Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This?
Illustrations by Eric Yahnker
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I.
She was very late. A man named Barry was compelled to lead the room in a rendition of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” to stall for time. But when she did arrive, the tardiness was forgiven and the Cobb County Republican Party’s November breakfast was made new. She wasn’t greeted. She was beheld, like a religious apparition. Emotions verged on rapture. Later, as she spoke, one man jumped to his feet with such force that his chair fell over. Not far away, two women clung to each other and shrieked. I was knocked to my seat when a tablemate’s corrugated-plastic FLOOD THE POLLS sign collided inadvertently with my head. Upon looking up, I came eye-level with a pistol tucked into the khaki waistband of an elderly man in front of me. “She is just so great,” I heard someone say. “I mean, she really is just amazing.”
Marjorie Taylor Greene arrived in Congress in January 2021, blond and crass and indelibly identified with conspiracy theories involving Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophiles. She had barely settled into office before being stripped of her committee assignments; she has been called a “cancer” on the Republican Party by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell; and she now has a loud voice in the GOP’s most consequential decisions on Capitol Hill because her party’s leaders know, and she knows they know, that she has become far too popular with their voters to risk upsetting her.
Nobody saw her coming. Not even Greene saw Greene coming.
II.
She was a product, her family loved to say, of the “Great American Dream.” There was a three-story home at the end of a shaded driveway in the small town of Cumming, Georgia, north of Atlanta; there was a finished basement in which Marge—and that is what she was called, Marge—and her friends would gather in faded nylon one-pieces after a swim in Lake Lanier.
[David A. Graham: Marjorie Taylor Greene is just a symptom of what ails the GOP]
Her father was Robert David Taylor, a Michigan transplant for whom a three-story home had never been guaranteed but who had believed acutely in its possibility. Bob Taylor was the son of a steel-mill worker; he had served in Vietnam; he had hung siding to pay for classes at Eastern Michigan University. He had married the beautiful Carrie Fidelle Bacon—“Delle,” to most people, but he called her Carrie—from Milledgeville, Georgia, and rather than continue with college, he had become a contractor and built a successful company called Taylor Construction. For Marjorie Taylor, the first of Bob and Delle’s two children, the result was a world steeped in a distinctly suburban kind of certainty: packed lunches and marble kitchen countertops, semiannual trips to the beach, and the conviction that everything happens for a reason.
She came of age in Cumming, the seat of Forsyth County. With her turtleneck sweaters and highlighted mall bangs, Marge Taylor might have been any other teenage girl in America. At South Forsyth High School, class of 1992, she was a member of the Spanish club and a manager of the soccer team. She may not have been voted Most Spirited, but she dressed to theme during homecoming week; she may not have had the Best Sense of Humor, but by graduation she had amassed her share of inside jokes with friends. “Shh … It’s the people outside!” her senior quote reads in the high-school yearbook. “Run the cops are here! I’m gone!!” She was “nice to everyone,” “upbeat,” with “tons of confidence,” recalls Leslie Hamburger, a friend of hers and her brother David’s. “I have nothing but good memories.” The good-but-not-great student was hardly, in other words, an overachieving scold already plotting her ascent to Washington. It’s difficult to imagine an 18-year-old Ted Cruz bothering with something called the Hot Tuna Club.
Forsyth County was a calm, quiet, ordered place. But it had a history. In September 1912, an 18-year-old white girl was found bloodied and barely breathing in the woods lining the Chattahoochee River; she died two weeks later. Within 24 hours of her discovery, four Black men had been arrested and charged with assault. A white mob dragged one of the suspects from his cell and hanged him from a telephone pole. Two others were tried and executed.—more than 1,000 people. So successful were their efforts that the county would experience the modern civil-rights era vicariously at best. There were no signs to fuss over in Cumming, because there were no Black people to keep separate.
