Marjorie Taylor Greene tells all on her MAGA breakaway and says she was ‘naive’ to believe Trump was ‘man of the people’

Marjorie Taylor Greene is using her last few days as a member of Congress to reflect on how she believes she was led astray by President Donald Trump, who she now claims isn’t committed to helping his voters.

In a lengthy New York Times profile published Monday, she spoke in detail about the beginnings of her break with Trump and how it came to evolve over the first year of his second term.

The firebrand Georgia representative announced that she would leave Congress on January 5 amid her growing feud with the president and her dissatisfaction with the work of the Republican-held House of Representatives. Her exit will leave Speaker Mike Johnson with an even slimmer majority in the chamber.Greene told the Times that she had believed Trump was a “man of the people" - but her views had “matured.”

“I was just so naïve and outside of politics that it was easy for me to naïvely believe [in him]," she said.What changed her mind, according to Greene, was getting an up close look at the darker aspects of the president’s personality. She highlighted his remarks at the funeral of Charlie Kirk, where Trump seemed to mock Kirk for rejecting hatred in politics, telling a crowd: “I hate my opponent and I don’t want what’s best for them." She also referenced the president's apparently cold response to a threat she received against her son’s life - that she supposedly had herself to blame for turning on Trump.

“That was absolutely the worst statement,” Greene said of Trump's remark at the funeral. “ It just shows where his heart is. And that’s the difference, with her having a sincere Christian faith, and proves that he does not have any faith.”

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The remark is one of the congresswoman’s most personal criticisms of the president to date and comes as she continues to accuse both Trump and Johnson of being out of touch with Americans, particularly on issues surrounding economic hardship and cost-of-living. While Greene’s criticisms have largely been focused on policy, she has also pointed out the wave of threats her office received after her dispute with the president began and blamed Trump’s own personal bullying for causing it. In recent interviews, Greene has suggested that she recognizes her own role in the acceleration of American politics into a toxic wasteland, and feels regret over MAGA’s contributions to that dynamic.

She reiterated that belief to the Times in early December, according to the newspaper: “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong. You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what. And as a Christian, I don’t believe in doing that. I agree with Erika Kirk, who did the hardest thing possible and said it out loud.”

Her hesitance to descend into mudslinging hasn’t stopped the departing congresswoman from critiquing Trump’s priorities in the final days of her service. Over the past several months, Greene’s long history of skepticism towards foreign intervention or assistance of any kind led her to become one of the Republican Party’s leading critics of support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, including Israel’s brutal siege of Gaza over the past two years. The congresswoman has repeatedly argued that Trump is focused on foreign policy objectives over a domestic agenda aimed at cost-cutting in the federal government and dealing with the economic woes of the voters who elected him over Kamala Harris in 2024.

She also was one of a few Republicans to prominently defy Trump on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

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In a pair of tweets Sunday and Monday, Greene once again made those arguments, writing in one: “DOGE was one of the most popular plans of the ‘24 campaign because Americans are beyond furious about the insane amount of waste, fraud, and abuse. Just outright stealing. Which is why I created the DOGE Subcommittee... [p]erhaps now the Speaker and the admin will take DOGE more seriously.”

Greene lamented Trump’s back-to-back meetings with Netanyahu and, on Monday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at Mar-a-Lago in another tweet, exclaiming: “Can we just do America?”

Her criticisms of Trump’s own social and political circles to the Times revealed a broader disgust with Trumpism and the public face MAGA chooses to present to the world, at Mar-a-Lago and in the media.

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“I never liked the MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization,” she told the Times. “I have two daughters, and I’ve always been uncomfortable with how those women puff up their lips and enlarge their breasts.”

Trump and Greene’s dispute seemed by some political observers to be a long time coming, however. The Georgia congresswoman has been a frequent source of embarassing headlines for the Republican Party due to her past espousement of conspiracy theories including one often-mocked example where she suggested that devices in space controlled by the wealthy Rothschild family could be behind wildfires in the U.S., sparking the “Jewish Space Lasers” meme.

In Georgia, two major political battles are due to be fought in 2026: A race for Jon Ossoff’s seat in the U.S. Senate, and a gubernatorial election. Trump, as a kingmaker in Republican primaries, has been known to spurn even loyalists if he views them as weak general election candidates, such as was the case for Winsome Earle-Sears in Virginia’s elections in 2025.

Greene confirmed earlier this year that Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio commissioned a survey showing her losing the Senate race by double digits, and seemingly was already working for one of her would-be opponents. While she furiously denied a report that Trump himself had urged her not to run for Senate, Fabrizio’s loyalties could be taken as a sign of Trump’s, too.

Firing back at the congresswoman, Trump has attacked Greene as “crazy” and claimed that he was considering support for a primary challenger in her congressional district before she chose to resign.