I am a bit of a pessimist. That is what happens when one’s father emerges from two years in Auschwitz as the lone survivor of his family. When all of your relatives have been sent to the gas chambers and burned up by a fascist, it creates a sense of wariness.
My father was forever impacted by the Holocaust. He assured me, at every opportunity, that the world was a rotten place and that most of the people in it were rotten. I found that view of humanity a little too jaundiced even for me, but the events of the past decade have often seemed to prove him right.
Yet sometimes, occasionally, there is reason for optimism.
Three months ago, had anyone suggested to me that MAGA Mama U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R – Georgia) would have ever woken up and smelled the coffee, or the bacon, or the corn pone, or whatever the good folks of Georgia eat for breakfast, I would not have believed them. I would have accused them of being under the influence of street drugs. In my mind, it would take a miracle for Rep. Greene ever to be anything other than a Trump loyalist, but it now appears that a miracle has, indeed, occurred.
If the woman who called high school mass shootings “false flag” operations, who trumpeted that Jewish space lasers were the cause of California wildfires; who called for a “national divorce” of red states from blue states; and who was sure that Hilary Clinton was sex trafficking and cannibalizing children in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria can conclude, at last, that the Trump regime is rotten to the core, perhaps there is still hope for Republican Party leadership to wake up and smell the distinct odor of corruption, too.
Except that I believe they actually do smell the stench, all of them, but the only one who seems ready to acknowledge and react against it, the only one who appears to have developed a nascent backbone—let us call it a proto-spine—is the gentlewoman from Georgia.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is ticked off, really ticked off, about the clear cover-up of the Epstein files by the very people who, while running for office, pretended to be horrified by both the case and what appeared to be a concerted effort to conceal the names of the clients to whom Epstein sexually trafficked young women and girls. I watched an endless parade of MAGA candidates standing at lecterns during the 2024 campaign season, demanding that the files be released in their entirety, with Epstein’s client list exposed. They were abetted in those demands by all of MAGA media.
There really is nothing quite like faux moral outrage, the existing supply of which has now been depleted by the hyperbolic candidates whom Republicans elected to get to the bottom of the whole sordid, sickening mess. At the same time, MAGA media seems to have pressed the “mute” button on their previous demands for accountability.
One presumes that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel are still hard at work flushing thousands of pages of evidence down the presidential commode, or perhaps they have decided to wait for colder weather so they can burn them in Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ office fireplace. Her predecessor, Mark Meadows, made such frequent use of that fireplace for the purpose of destroying documents that his wife complained about the acrid smell of smoke on his suits that sent her dry cleaning bills through the roof.
Or perhaps they have become more creative and found some other means of destroying evidence of criminality not previously considered by Donald Trump and Mark Meadows as they frantically disposed of evidence of their seditious complicity in the January 6 insurrection.
Now that Donald Trump has ordered active testing of our nuclear missiles (what???), perhaps they will just shove the files into a warhead and send them to Mars.
But the Epstein files are not the only issue that has Marjorie Taylor Greene in a twist, not by a long shot. She knows, as do her MAGA colleagues, that it will be the residents of red states—Georgia among them—who are likely to suffer the most from her party’s determination to give even more money to the already-rich by withdrawing essential services from the poor. SNAP benefits, Medicaid, senior services, and services for disabled children and adults are all on the chopping block, as is the Affordable Care subsidy for individuals who do not receive health insurance from their employers. She knows her constituents are about to lose vital assistance, and her hair is on fire.
It makes me wonder if Rep. Greene may be having, at last, a political epiphany. She seems to have realized that she invested a huge amount of blind faith in one of the worst people on Earth. Far from the populist champion he claimed to be, Donald Trump has finally revealed himself to be the East Coast elite that he has always been.
Perhaps she has realized, at last, that eating mountains of quarter pounders with cheese while flying around on his private jet and violating the Constitution at every opportunity has not made Trump a man of the people, any more than her appearance at her first State of the Union address, wrapped in a white fur stole, made her Princess Grace of Monaco.
One wonders what Greene thinks of the complete refusal of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson—who makes much, at every opportunity, of his devout Christian faith—to seat the new congresswoman from Arizona who has vowed to be the final signatory on a petition to force the release of the unredacted Epstein materials. Perhaps Ms. Greene is wondering why Mike Johnson’s Christianity, like the House of Representatives itself, has been on a lengthy hiatus, but the answer is clear: The United States president’s name appears more than 1,000 times in the files.
It could be that Rep. Greene is pondering what the rest of us have been pondering for quite some time: “What would Jesus do in the same circumstances, Mr. Johnson, and what sort of Christian values are you projecting by working so hard to conceal the victimization of women and girls by some of the most powerful and revolting men on the planet?”
Or maybe she is wondering why the president of the United States is untroubled by withholding food, medical care, housing, and disaster relief from her constituents, while enthusiastically spending taxpayer money on the refurbishment of a Qatari flying palace that he will take with him if he ever leaves office; marbling and gold-plating his White House bathroom and gilding every available surface of his presidential palace; pledging between $20 billion and $40 billion to an Argentine dictator while bankrupting American cattle ranchers and soy farmers; receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from domestic and international fat cats to demolish the historic East Wing of the White House in order to build his own version of Versailles; and sending his gibbering sons and sons-in-law all over the planet to cash in on his presidency to the tune of billions of dollars.
It would be wonderful to watch the full-fledged political conversion of Ms. Greene from nattering MAGA majorette to principled independent whose mission is to serve the men, women, and children of her home state.
If Marjorie Taylor Greene can finally get the memo, maybe the rest of her conference can also get the memo in the not-too-distant future; and if our duly elected representatives can get the memo, maybe the rest of us can, too.
