Marjorie Taylor Greene, the firebrand Georgia Republican, has been breaking ranks with President Donald Trump and the GOP leadership in Congress on an increasingly long list of issues.

She wants Congress to end the government shutdown by agreeing to extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. She has demanded the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, called for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, blasted the White House’s funding of wars in Ukraine and Israel and, most recently, torched the administration’s economic bailout of Argentina.

Greene calls herself “MAGA through and through,” “100% America first,” and carefully avoids directly criticizing Trump by name — but she blames Republican leaders in Congress for not following through on campaign promises to address the cost of living, lower health care premiums and end forever wars.

“Don’t tell me you’re gonna do these things, and not do them,” she told podcaster Tim Dillon this month, adding a not-so-subtle swipe at Trump for his lack of focus: “It shouldn’t be about helping your crypto donors or your AI donors or welcoming in these people that hated you.”

It’s a measure of political savvy that distinguishes Greene from her peers. State Representative Kasey Carpenter, a Republican restaurant owner from Dalton whose solidly red northwest Georgia district includes part of Greene’s, has a name for what she’s doing: decoupling. Greene is separating herself from the president’s actions, but only on carefully-chosen issues that she believes have betrayed the MAGA agenda and are popular in her district.

“There are a lot of people who are not happy about her decoupling, but unless something crazy happens, she’s going to be re-elected,” Carpenter told me. Greene’s shift, he posits, is pragmatic. “Prior to these decoupling movements, she couldn’t run statewide,” he said.

Georgia is a purple state. Republicans control the state Legislature and executive branch, but two Democrats serve in the U.S. Senate and a solid swath of voters consistently cross party lines.

After campaigning across the country for Trump, enduring vilification from both parties and becoming one of MAGA’s highest-profile elected officials, Greene surely had earned the opportunity to run for either the U.S. Senate against Democrat Jon Ossoff or for the open governor’s seat. But the White House, and reportedly Trump himself, urged her to run for re-election instead.

Greene learned what many ambitious women before her have learned: Don’t count on your loyalty being rewarded with advancement. She decided she had to carve her own path forward. She lashed out against “White House staff,” issued a 624-word missive blasting her state party’s “good ol’ boy system” and, last month, said she wouldn’t be endorsing Republicans in either race.

Greene’s district is one of the most conservative in the state. It stretches from the northwest corner bordering North Carolina and Tennessee through rural farmland and into northern Cobb County, part of metro Atlanta. It voted overwhelmingly for Trump in the last three elections. But Greene defends her “decoupling” by saying she is simply reflecting what her constituents tell her. (Greene’s office did not respond to my request for an interview.)

Last week, I had conversations with nearly three dozen residents of her district. Few were convinced Greene was motivated by principle to break from Trump, but everyone agreed Greene was reflecting the community’s concerns.

“I love her because she’s a voice for the people,” said Elizabeth Fielden, a Republican of Ringgold, Georgia.

“She can admit when she’s wrong and she can change a position upon thought,” said Dan Morgan, a lawyer and Republican who lives in Greene’s adopted hometown of Rome, Georgia.

“She was shunned,” said Paul O’Mara, a photographer and a Rome Democrat, referring to Greene’s desire for higher office. “She’s taking revenge — and it’s an interesting revenge.”

Doug Bowling, owner of Doug’s Deli in downtown Rome, described his challenges with the economic issues Greene is trying to get her party to focus on. With the inflated cost of groceries, “we’re making no money,” he said. As wages rise and the labor pool shrinks under the immigration crackdown, his labor costs are soaring and “they’ll never come down.”

When it comes to health care, Bowling said he wants Congress to listen to Greene and extend the Affordable Care Act tax credits. He offers health care coverage to his employees through the ACA marketplace and worries about what might happen if rates rise by 80–200% as projected. As of 2024, 74,000 people in the district receive tax credits to help lower their monthly premium payments, according to the advocacy group Keep Americans Covered.

Bowling said he was “very apprehensive” about Greene when she arrived from Atlanta as a big-city outsider promoting QAnon conspiracies. “But the more I watched her, I don’t think she’s that radical,” he told me. “You can only follow somebody’s coattails for so long, and she has a really good pulse on her community and the people.”

There are 272 Republican members of Congress and Greene is the only one who has had the courage to say that the GOP has had years to come up with an alternative to Obamacare and it can’t continue to just be “no.” Her punches are landing. Last week, 13 Republicans in vulnerable House districts joined in the call to extend the ACA subsidies and come up with a “clear path forward.”

But my visit to Greene’s district told me that the headwinds for the party in power go beyond the standoff over health care. “There’s some real cracks in the economy,” Carpenter, the Dalton state representative, told me. “The ‘haves’ are fine but the ‘have nots’ are not. The tariffs are really affecting more lower-class folks. For the upper class, it’s just a rounding issue.”

Business owners who relied on immigrant labor told me they are pinched. Legal immigrants spoke of their friends and family members who are still undocumented and now “can’t freely walk around.” A new battery plant expects to open in nearby Cartersville, but it is dependent on Koreans on temporary visas to open. And public-school enrollment in the region is down.

Greene has the luxury to “carve my own lane,” as she says, because she has created a national brand for herself and a strong public following that likely inoculates her from retribution — and primary challenges. But in an era when Republicans in Congress have abdicated their responsibilities as an independent branch of government, provided little oversight of the administration, and offered no political resistance to even Trump’s most shocking power grabs, Greene’s pushback is a welcome development.

She may be motivated by frustration and self-interest, but the constituents I spoke with say she’s listening — and that’s a healthy thing for democracy.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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