On the Campaign Trail With Marjorie Taylor Greene
A two-part series
I have a pair of new stories in TIME today about the far-right faction in Congress and how they’re shaping the future of the Republican Party. First is a feature about the ‘MAGA Squad,’ the hard-core pro-Trump House caucus headed by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Democrats and many Republicans deride the group as gadflies, irrelevant to the serious business of lawmaking. But in fact, the MAGA Squad has been cannily building leverage and clout in the halls of Congress. Now, with the primary season in full swing across the country, they’re looking to pad their numbers, recruiting like-minded firebrands in red districts, endorsing and campaigning for fellow insurgents in intra-party contests, and even, in some cases, campaigning against their own colleagues. (Gaetz boasts that a rally he headlined last year for Harriet Hageman, a primary opponent of Representative Liz Cheney, was at that time “the largest political event in Wyoming history without a rodeo element.”)
As part of the reporting for that piece, I spent some time on the campaign trail with Marjorie Taylor Greene in her district in Northwest Georgia, including a rare exclusive one-on-one interview. That resulted in a companion piece that I hope you’ll also check out (with terrific photos, including the one above, by the great Andrew Hetherington).
The morning fog rises from the red clay of Northwest Georgia, and the rolling green landscape is saturated with Greene’s large white vinyl campaign signs. FLOOD THE POLLS! they say on top, in red, and SAVE AMERICA, STOP COMMUNISM! on the bottom. When she first ran for Congress two years ago, Greene will later explain, the signs said STOP SOCIALISM instead. That was before she got to Washington, met the Democrats, and decided that what she was up against was far worse than she had even imagined.
Come for the space lasers, stay for the Bang Energy drinks—plus a surprise ending! Read the stories here: