Commentary: How could Marjorie Taylor Greene make a comeback?

In a video posted to X late Friday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., announced she’d be resigning from Congress in early January, only halfway through her third term. Greene explained the decision in a direct-to-camera speech from her home, saying she’s “always been despised in Washington, D.C., and just never fit in” and suggesting that President Trump has tried to “destroy” her amid a weekslong feud between Trump and Greene over releasing the Justice Department’s files about the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

“It’s all so absurd and completely unserious,” Greene said, citing personal attacks, death threats, slander and lies that have been told about her during her five years in the House. “I refuse to be the ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

In an interview with CBS News earlier this month, Greene had called Trump’s approach to the Epstein files a“huge miscalculation.” Just days later, Trump — who referred to Greene as a “traitor” and threatened to back a primary challenger in next year’s election — succumbed to an overwhelming House vote and signed a bill to release the files.

It’s the latest in a recent string of moves — from clashing with House Speaker Mike Johnson over expiring ACA subsidies to condemning U.S. aid to Israel — that have put Greene at odds with GOP leadership. While surprising, her break is not without precedent. In 2020, former Sen. Mitt Romney cast the sole Republican vote to convict Trump during his first impeachment trial. The next year, former Rep. Liz Cheney broke with nearly all of her GOP colleagues to help lead the Jan. 6 probe. Yet Greene’s pivot has drawn a much colder response, with many across the political spectrum questioning her motives.

What separates Greene from Cheney or Romney is a deficit of trust. In politics, credibility is currency, and Greene’s account is well overdrawn. From peddling conspiracy theories about“Jewish space lasers” to flip-flopping on a major budget bill she hadn’t read in full, years of inconsistency, exaggeration and deceit have left Greene with outstanding reputational debt. Every new claim is weighed against a ledger of falsehoods and contradictions, and the public, like any rational lender, hesitates to extend Greene more credit.

That skepticism may be justified, but it exposes how politicians have no real way to regain credibility once it’s lost. When trust collapses, there is no structured process to rebuild it. Journalism offers corrections and religion offers penance, but politics offers only apology. And apology, on its own, does not repair trust.

The cost of that vacuum is enormous. Without trust, every attempt to evolve breeds skepticism. Amid that suspicion, even sincere change is costly: Rethinking a policy position risks both betraying supporters and failing to win over critics. Growth, then, becomes politically irrational. Only a process for earning back trust can break this cycle.

Fortunately, the legal system has designed one. For more than a decade, San Francisco has operated Make It Right, a restorative justice program for young people accused of felony-level offenses like burglary and assault. Rather than face prosecution, defendants are given the option to perform community service, attend counseling sessions and pay restitution. At each stage, the program collects detailed attendance records and participation logs.

Over a four-year period, those who completed Make It Right fared significantly better than those tried in court. After the first six months, only 24% had been arrested again, compared with 43% of those in the control group. That gap held steady after a year and widened to about 27 percentage points by the end of the study. Similar programs — like Brooklyn’s Common Justice and Oakland’s Restorative Community Conferencing — show comparable results.

Restorative justice doesn’t work simply because participants complete a set number of service hours or counseling sessions. It works because completing those steps requires thousands of small, measurable choices that, together, make reoffense less likely. The process produces a continuous record of behavior: every drug test passed, progress report filed and floor swept clean becomes a concrete data point. Each task is a minor act of redress, an entry in a growing ledger of conduct. Prison, by contrast, collects far less information; it measures time served, not initiative shown.

A perfect record alone doesn’t prove that someone has changed, but it demonstrates consistent follow-through. Over time, that behavior becomes predictive: The longer it continues and the more data points it produces, the lower the risk of reoffense. When that risk falls below a reasonable threshold, trust returns. Parole operates on the same logic. Politics has no way to reproduce that process because it can’t accurately measure the probability of follow-through. Without that data, the decision to trust again can’t be anything but a guess.

Some will argue that applying this model to politics would let controversial figures like Greene off easy. It does the opposite. A system for restoring credibility would merely surface the data needed to evaluate whether future trust is reasonable. If the data reveals a lack of effort or consistency, that failure becomes part of the record. The goal is less to rehabilitate politicians than to rehabilitate judgment.

The real risk is that evidence here is predictive, not dispositive. No amount of completed tasks can prove genuine reform. But that’s the value of scale: At worst, even insincere efforts still benefit the community they’re meant to serve. The public park still gets cleaned, the town hall still gets held, the redress payment still gets delivered. What protects the integrity of such a system is the sheer accumulation of work that makes even self-interest socially productive.

Data is the only antidote to distrust. The challenge, then, is how to build a system that contains the greatest number of micro tests. The specific tests matter less than the consistent record they produce: a steady accumulation of follow-through that makes renewed trust a rational inference rather than a leap of faith. Until such evidence exists, whether Greene — or anyone in public life — deserves a second chance will remain a question we are forced to answer in the dark.

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Ryan W. Powers is a legal analyst who writes a weekly newsletter on democracy, dissent and the law.