Marjorie Taylor Greene Becomes The Onion Meme; Criticizes GOP Leaders For Gov’t Shutdown

It's a meme so famous it has its own Wikipedia page. And like plenty of memes with this sort of pedigree, its origins are humble: just another article by The Onion (or rather its Clickhole offshoot). You know the face and you know the words:

Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point

To Marjorie Taylor Greene's credit, she's done this more than once. She's the wild card in the GOP party, but not the kind that might lead to another win. She's the other kind of wild card: the unknown and unpredictable factor that occasionally delivers debacles and flame outs, rather than the easy, uncomplicated heist of democracy her party is actively engaged in.

So, when MTG goes rogue, it means something. But it possibly means less than if a staid backbencher suddenly stood up and declared Trump wrong about anything. That said, we'll take what we can get when the takings are so meager and limited in quantity.

Here's Taylor Greene saying what everyone knows, but no one else in her party will say:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is continuing to buck GOP congressional leadership, placing blame on top Republicans Thursday morning for failing to pull the government from its ongoing shutdown.

I'm not putting the blame on the president," Greene (R-Ga.) said in an interview on CNN's The Situation Room." I'm actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader [John] Thune in the Senate. This should not be happening."

Government shutdowns are a GOP specialty under Trump. This time around, though, the White House has expressly politicized the shutdown via its official websites, which is just another line this administration feels comfortable crossing.

The administration is angry because Democratic legislators won't sign off on every ridiculous thing the Republican party is demanding in exchange for a barely-functioning government. In addition, it's clear the GOP doesn't actually want the shutdown ended, what with the administration using it as an excuse to lay off or fire people it wasn't able to get rid of back when DOGE was still a going concern.

Marjorie Taylor Greene placing the blame where it belongs (speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate leader John Thune) definitely bucks the trend when it comes to Republican discussions of the ongoing shutdown. The GOP has aligned with the administration, which has chosen to publicly blame (again, via official government websites) the Democratic party for a crisis the GOP deliberately created to use as leverage to push through even more odious legislation.

Taylor Greene, of course, is no angel. Between her COVID conspiracy theories and her insistence that some sort of Jewish-controlled space laser" caused California wildfires, Taylor Greene has been nothing but batshit crazy while somehow maintaining access to considerable public power. Pizzagate, QAnon, replacement theory, etc. have all been part of Greene's arsenal for years. But this time, she's actually right. There's no conspiracy here. There's just the GOP holding the government hostage until it gets what it wants.

And now, her super-weird form of local advocacy has turned her into the rogue the GOP can't control. It's not just this recent shutdown. It's a whole lot of things the GOP would rather pretend simply didn't exist, beginning with the Epstein files and running right through the healthcare price hikes their constituents will be facing if the GOP manages to pass the budget bill it has proposed:

Greene has continued to be a thorn in the side of Republican leadership in recent weeks, splitting from President Donald Trump and the GOP on a string of major topics -calling the warin Gaza a genocide,"campaigning for the releaseof files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case andpushing for an extensionof enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies.

MTG - however momentarily - has just become one of us: people who can not only see through the GOP's increasingly stupid lies, but know that America's never going to be great again with these motherfuckers in charge. There may be hope for Taylor Greene after all. But if recent history has anything to say about it, the new, improved MTG will be just as unpredictably awful as she was prior to this brief return to reality.