MTG and the Rebranding of the GOP

 

Last week began with Trump giving up on the Epstein files — yup, we heard about that on Monday. It ended Friday with Marjorie Taylor Greene announcing her resignation from Congress. Between those two bookends we got a blizzard of WTF moments, mostly centered around the snowballing Epstein scandal.

What we seem to be witnessing, in real time, is the disintegration of Trump’s hold on the Republican Party. More than that, we’re watching the party enter into a sort of every-man-for-himself mode, in which all the thugs, scammers, and imbeciles who have propped Trump up for so long are now headed for the exits. Or, as my friends at the Professional Left podcast call it, the lifeboats.

And why wouldn’t they? The good ship Trump is sinking in front of their eyes. He’s deteriorating both physically and mentally, and the questions about his health will only get louder and harder for his toadies to explain away. He will aggravate this by spewing rants that get more unhinged by the day. He sees no way out of the Epstein thing, and he’s flailing.

So we are fast approaching the time when vast numbers of the people who voted for Trump — many of them three times — will swear they did no such thing. Same for the politicians who rode Trump’s coattails, who either participated in the greed and grift, or looked the other way. They’ll be looking for a place to land, besides jail.

In the House, Republicans are all facing re-election next year, and they have no idea how to explain to voters why their health insurance premiums are double their mortgage, why there’s no place to deliver a baby within five hundred miles, and why they’re stretching meals with Hamburger Helper. Voters are not in a good mood.

So what we’re about to see over the next year is a desperate effort to rebrand the GOP, to repackage the party so the meatheads still get their raw meat, but in a new “Reduced Trump!” formula.

And nobody is rebranding faster than Marjorie Taylor Greene. Her resignation announcement could not have been slicker. The timing, the talking points, the wildly disingenuous populism, the sheer chutzpah of throwing gasoline on the GOP, then fleeing the scene.

Let me say first that I don’t believe this was about Trump’s threats, or that she couldn’t possibly put her constituents through a “hateful and hurtful primary.” Nor do I believe that the “Political Industrial Complex” — her latest catchphrase — kept her from her goal of protecting “the little guy.” The same little guy she has repeatedly voted to pummel.

Rather, I think she’d been planning this for some time. She might not have known the timing, but she knew what she wanted to do. This is a cunning person, and she could see Trump’s evident disintegration — physical, mental, and political — at closer range than we ever will. She could see that her entire generation of loony elected officials was at risk of going down hard in the midterms. The whole house of lies could explode, and she wanted to be well outside the blast area when it happened.

She also knew there was a market for life after Trump, for the same idiocy, but younger and with better hair. So she used the shutdown to re-invent herself. On November 4, three weeks ago, she stuck her neck way out and went on The View. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear you were watching an Obama Democrat.

Gone was the aw-shucks country girl who once called the Gestapo the ‘Gazpacho,’ now replaced by the well-spoken suburban mom concerned about the ACA subsidies being pulled out from under working families. Almost as if she hadn’t personally voted to let those subsidies expire. The ladies on The View managed to get a few digs in, but they were no match.

And just like that, the big rebrand was under way. But before we admire the new and improved MTG, let’s pause for a moment to review her career to this point:

It would be reductive to simply call Marge a racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic white supremacist, and let it go at that. Such a description glosses over the details, like her embrace of QAnon, Pizzagate, the so-called White Replacement Theory, and her calling for the execution of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. She compared Covid-19 safety measures to the persecution of Jews in the Holocaust, and she suggested that California wildfires were started by “Jewish space lasers.” Please note her somewhat scattered positions on Judaism.

She has never admitted that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. She was never punished for her seditious role in the January 6 insurrection. And she was stripped of her House committee assignments in 2021 by a Democratic majority that ran out of patience with her conspiracy theory antics.

I’m not even scratching the surface here, but let’s just say she got where she is by playing to the MAGA base at its very basest.

At some point, she sensed Trump was wounded, perhaps fatally, and the Epstein files gave her the perfect vehicle to poke the bear. This was perfectly in keeping with her QAnon past. She still has street cred with that crowd, and she can bat her eyelashes and say with a straight face that she was a victim, that she was bamboozled into thinking Trump would be arresting and punishing a vast ring of pedophiles, only to find out one of the ringleaders just might be Trump himself.

So she signed on to the House discharge petition, a really risky move, but the risk had been well calculated. The fuse had been lit, the bear had been poked.

Then, just as Trump caved on the Epstein files, she pulled the ripcord. She announced she was jumping off the plane before it could spiral out of control. And she did it in such a way that her seat would be vacant for months, leaving Mike Johnson one less vote in an extremely shaky House GOP caucus. This was a clear middle finger to Johnson and, more importantly, to Trump.

So Marge is burning some bridges, to be sure, but that was calculated as well. I don’t buy her supposed concern about being primaried from the right. Her bigger concern would be losing her seat to a Democrat, which could happen in the wave election she’s quite openly predicting. So pulling herself out of the picture altogether is not a bad move at all.

She’s young enough to bide her time, to sit out the next few years and wait for  the dust to settle. There will no doubt be a job at Fox that can keep her in the public eye. She has said she wants to be governor of Georgia, or to run for the Senate, but I think she gets this is not her moment.

For now, it’s enough that she’s clear of the blast area. She’s the first major MAGA figure to bail on Trump, but she won’t be the last. Every Republican facing the voters in the midterms will have to decide when to bail. If they jump too soon, Trump will crush them like a bug. Jump too late and their own voters will do the crushing.

Marge timed her jump, but we don’t yet know how well. We do know that she has opted out of the conversation, at least for now. That doesn’t seem like her, so we’ll see how that goes.

It’s a cliché to say that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but I can safely say Marge and I won’t be friends any time soon. Rebrand notwithstanding.