Marjorie Taylor Greene: Education, Career, and Political Ascent

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a prominent figure in contemporary American politics, has garnered significant attention as a U.S. Representative for Georgia's 14th Congressional District since assuming office on January 3, 2021. A polarizing figure because of her combative style and controversial views, Greene first drew national attention when running for Congress because she had promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on social media. By positioning herself as a prominent voice of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) political movement, a coalition of right-wing populists that coalesced during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-21), she gained the attention of prominent Republican leaders. Her career, marked by both staunch advocacy and considerable controversy, reflects a unique path from business to the forefront of national political discourse.

Early Life and Education

Marjorie Taylor was born in May 1974 in Milledgeville, Georgia, as the first child of Robert (“Bob”) Taylor and Carrie Fidelle (“Delle”) Bacon. Delle Bacon was from Milledgeville, a small town southeast of Atlanta that served as Georgia’s state capital until Reconstruction. Her mother, Marjorie Bacon, was Taylor’s namesake. Bob Taylor, a Michigander from a blue-collar family, had moved to Georgia a few years earlier and opened a construction company. Taylor grew up in the northeastern suburbs of Atlanta. She was a typical neighborhood kid and was well liked by those who knew her at South Forsyth High School. She never showed signs of interest in political leadership, nor did she seem to have any particularly grand aspirations. She was engaged in her father’s local business, working for the company while in high school.

Greene's academic pursuits led her to the University of Georgia, where she studied business administration. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1996.

Business Career

Marjorie Taylor Greene has a lifetime of business experience, having grown up working in her family’s company. She met her husband-to-be, Perry Greene, while studying. The couple married in 1995 and Taylor appended her husband’s surname to her maiden name. The couple went on to help manage the Taylor family business. They started a family of their own in 1998 with the birth of the first of their three children: Lauren, Taylor and Derek. In 2002 Marjorie purchased Taylor Commercial, a commercial construction and renovation company. From 2007 to 2011, Marjorie Taylor Greene was listed as its chief financial officer.

She became active in CrossFit in 2011 and made it an important component of her lifestyle for several years. By 2012, Greene worked as a part-time coach at an Alpharetta CrossFit gym. Along with a partner she opened a commercial gym in 2013. Marjorie successfully started, grew, and sold a thriving CrossFit gym here in Georgia which has become one of the top CrossFit gyms in the country. She later sold her stake in 2016. Greene filed for divorce in 2012, after she allegedly had affairs with two men that she had met while doing CrossFit. The couple reconciled, but Perry filed for divorce 10 years later, stating that the marriage had been “irretrievably broken.” The divorce was finalized in December 2022.

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Entry into Politics

Until 2016 Greene was largely inactive when it came to politics. She did not vote in the 2012 presidential election or the 2014 midterm elections. But when Trump hit the campaign trail for the 2016 presidential race, she found him refreshingly down-to-earth. “He was someone I could relate to…And I thought, ‘finally, maybe this is someone who will do something about the things that deeply bother me.’” She still did not make it out to the polls that year. But in a sign that she was beginning to feel that she could make a difference, she made a onetime donation to Trump’s campaign in October 2016.

As allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign surfaced in the months that followed, she sought to understand the debate. She did not feel she could get reliable information by listening to CNN or the Fox News Channel, so she tried to find information on her own. “What I did was I started looking up things on the Internet, asking questions, like most people do every day, use Google.” Like many Americans at that time, she looked for answers but found narratives that confirmed some of her preconceived notions. QAnon caught her attention, helping construct a false reality for her that was reinforced by her interactions on social media platforms. When in 2021 she publicly disavowed some of the conspiracy theories that she had once espoused, she conceded that she had fallen for them simply by exploring them and engaging with them. Greene’s participation in these online communities spurred her turn to political activism, primarily by means of commentary. In 2017 she began contributing to a Web blog, AmericanTruthSeekers.com. She wrote lengthy posts on her social media accounts that lacked logic or structure; perhaps the most infamous of these was a 2018 essay that suggested that recent wildfires had been caused by space lasers owned by the Rothschild family.

In March 2019 the Senate held hearings on gun control. Greene traveled to Washington, D.C., to have her say as a private gun owner. Armed with her camera, she found herself routinely ignored on Capitol Hill, including by Republican legislators and staffers. Meanwhile, she noticed that lawmakers were meeting with David Hogg, one of the student survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, who had become a recognizable advocate for gun control. In one video she follows Hogg and ridicules him, accusing him of using children to take away her Second Amendment rights. If Greene was not going to be heard in Congress as a citizen, then she was determined to have her say as a member.

In May she filed to run in the Republican primaries in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, where she had been living. But that district was volatile in the highly competitive election cycle of 2020, and Republicans were eager to avoid a messy primary. Members of the House Freedom Caucus reportedly pushed Greene to run instead in Georgia’s 14th congressional district, a heavily conservative district whose representative was not seeking reelection; she agreed to switch. On December 13, 2019, Greene announced that she was shifting her campaign to the 14th district after incumbent Tom Graves announced he would not run for reelection there. The district includes much of Northwest Georgia, stretching from the Georgia side of the Chattanooga metropolitan area to the exurbs of Atlanta. Members of the House are constitutionally required to live in the state they represent, but not necessarily in the same congressional district. Hence, although Greene had lived for a long time in Milton, in the 6th district, there would have been no legal barrier to Greene running for the 14th.

During her campaign for the 14th district, she garnered national attention for her endorsement of QAnon and her controversial posts on social media, leading many Republican figures to condemn her statements and to back her primary opponent. Greene campaigned as a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump but was not endorsed by him. Greene finished first in the June 9 primary. Trump tweeted, "A big winner". Greene was expected to face Democratic IT specialist Kevin Van Ausdal, but he withdrew from the race on September 11. This left Greene unopposed in the general election, which she won with 74% of the vote. Van Ausdal, whose name remained on the ballot, took 25%.

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Tenure in the House of Representatives (2021- )

Greene appeared for her swearing-in on January 3, 2021, wearing a black face mask with the words “TRUMP WON” emblazoned across the front. She was one of the many Trump supporters who contended that the election had gone in Trump’s favor, even though the results showed a clear victory for Joe Biden in both the electoral college and the popular vote.

In 2024 Greene comfortably won reelection against Democratic challenger Shawn Harris.

First Year in Congress

Hours later, after the Capitol had been secured, Greene joined more than a hundred fellow Republicans in formally challenging the results of the election. She objected to the votes submitted by Michigan, which was one of the states that Trump had carried in 2016 but not in 2020.

In her first months in Congress, Greene did little to make friends. She was often combative with her fellow legislators, Republican and Democrat alike. She found herself shut out from much of congressional business, similar to when she had visited the Capitol in 2019. But this time she could obstruct legislation-whether because it was just one of the few waves she could make or because she wanted to hold lawmakers accountable for even the most mundane of the legislature’s measures. She objected to one voice vote after another, not only derailing some bills from moving forward but also forcing her colleagues in both parties to record their positions and open their votes up for scrutiny.

Meanwhile, she proved to be a force to be reckoned with. Unencumbered by committee assignments, she made appearances at rallies and conferences, where her claims of a stolen election helped bolster her appeal as a populist. By April Greene had raised millions of dollars in political donations from individual donors. At the end of the year, only 3 of the 212 Republican members of the House had surpassed her in fundraising-even though she did not receive funds from corporate donors.

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The Voice of MAGA in Congress

That during her first term Greene represented a powerful segment of the Republican base was not lost on Kevin McCarthy, then the minority leader of the House. He began meeting with her regularly. He also invited her to policy meetings so that he could hear her take on important matters. Whether he agreed with her position on the issues, he understood that many voters (and donors) across the country shared her perspective.

In the 2022 midterm elections Greene was reelected in a landslide, while Republicans won control of the House by just a narrow margin. Her position in Congress was safely assured, but McCarthy’s leadership was not. He needed the support of Greene and other far-right colleagues whom she could muster. Aware of her importance to McCarthy, she threw her support behind him as Speaker of the House, abandoning efforts by other populists to deny him the speakership, which he eventually won. Days later, he awarded her seats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Key Votes and Legislation

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been involved in several key votes and legislative actions during her time in Congress. These include:

Voting against certifying the electoral votes from Arizona and Pennsylvania on January 6-7, 2021.
Voting in favor of H.Con.Res. 21, denouncing the horrors of socialism, in 2023.
Supporting efforts to impeach Joe Biden.
Introducing the "Protect Children's Innocence Act" in August 2022.
Voting against the bill to reauthorize the National Marrow Donor Program on April 15, 2021.

Committee Assignments

Greene was briefly a member of the Committee on the Budget and the Committee on Education and Labor. On February 4, 2021, the House of Representatives voted 230-199 to remove Greene from her assignments on the Labor and the Budget and Education committees. The vote was a response to multiple controversial remarks made by the first-term lawmaker, including a claim that school shootings are staged events. Republican leadership had offered an alternative response. Before the vote, Greene addressed the House floor.

She was later assigned to the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Committee on Homeland Security.

Positions on Key Issues

Greene has taken strong stances on various issues, often aligning with conservative viewpoints.

Abortion: Greene opposes abortion, calling it "the worst scar a woman can carry for the rest of her life". In videos apparently recorded between 2017 and 2019, Greene said that abortion and Planned Parenthood are two factors holding back minorities in the country, and in an August 2020 interview with Fox News, she indicated her support for defunding Planned Parenthood.
COVID-19: Greene refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine, stating there was no reason to because she is "perfectly healthy".
LGBTQ+ Rights: On February 24, 2021, Greene tried to block the Equality Act while it was being debated on the House floor, saying that it would "destroy God's creation" and "violate everything we hold dear in God's creation". She proposed replacing it with a bill that would exempt nonprofit organizations, allow people to sue the federal government "if their religious rights are violated", and prevent trans women and girls from participating in women's sports.
Climate Change: Greene rejects the scientific consensus that climate change is caused primarily by human activity, saying in 2021 that "maybe perhaps we live on a ball that rotates around the sun, that flies through the universe, and maybe our climate just changes." In an August 2022 interview, Greene said, "People die in the cold. This Earth warming, and carbon, is actually healthy for us. It helps us to feed people, it keeps people alive.
Evolution: Greene has said that she does not accept the scientific consensus of evolution, calling it a "type of so-called science" and saying: "I don't believe in evolution.

Controversies

Marjorie Taylor Greene's political career has been marked by numerous controversies.

QAnon Conspiracy Theories: Greene first drew national attention when running for Congress because she had promoted QAnon conspiracy theories on social media.
Remarks on School Shootings: The House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from all committee roles in response to her endorsements of political violence. In statements made in 2019 and in a February 4, 2021 House floor speech, Greene explained her position on gun rights and school shootings.
Holocaust Comments: On a podcast hosted by evangelical commentator David Brody, Greene called Pelosi "mentally ill" and said that Pelosi's requirement that House members continue wearing masks until they all prove they have been vaccinated "is exactly the [same] type of abuse" as Jews being "put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany" during the Holocaust.
Association with Nick Fuentes: In February 2022, Greene spoke at a conference hosted by white supremacist Nick Fuentes, at which Fuentes called the January 6 attack "awesome" and praised Putin and Hitler.
Conflict with Lauren Boebert: In June 2023, Greene was expelled from the Freedom Caucus by a vote of its members. The vote came after Greene called fellow caucus member Lauren Boebert a "little bitch" during an argument on the House floor. It was the first time the group ever voted to expel one of its members.

Attempts to Remove House Speaker Johnson

The House of Representatives voted down the resolution introduced by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia to vacate the House Speaker’s position. She promoted the motion after Speaker Johnson worked on bipartisan legislation, both for foreign aid and for federal appropriations. Speaker Johnson responded, “I would really like to advance much more of our conservative policy on a daily basis here.

Personal Life

Taylor studied business administration at the University of Georgia. She met her husband-to-be, Perry Greene, while studying. The couple married in 1995 and Taylor appended her husband’s surname to her maiden name. They started a family of their own in 1998 with the birth of the first of their three children. In 2006 Perry Greene took over leadership of the company. Greene filed for divorce in 2012, after she allegedly had affairs with two men that she had met while doing CrossFit. The couple reconciled, but Perry filed for divorce 10 years later, stating that the marriage had been “irretrievably broken.” The divorce was finalized in December 2022.

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