by Jay Bookman, Georgia Recorder, [This article first appeared in the Georgia Recorder, republished with permission]

May 15, 2025

Through most of last week, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene sounded pretty much committed to a run for the U.S. Senate seat now held by Jon Ossoff. She made it clear how eager she was to run, how much she wanted to be the one to reclaim the seat that in her mind Democrats had stolen. She wanted to wait and think about it over the weekend, she said, but her intention seemed obvious.

Then suddenly, everything changed.

On Friday, before the weekend even arrived, Greene announced that she no longer had any interest in the Senate. In a long, embittered bitter rant on social media, she explained that “the Senate doesn’t work” and that the Republican elite has lost touch with the American people.

“I won’t fight for a team that refuses to win, that protects its weakest players and that undermines the very people it’s supposed to serve,” she wrote.

“Can I deliver for the people of Georgia in the Senate?” she went on to ask. “Can I fulfill my promises? Can I actually save this country from the inside?” The answer, she concluded, was that she could not because her fellow Republicans would not help her.

Greene is nothing if not stubborn, so why the sudden change of heart? My theory is that the only person who could have forced such a change was Donald Trump, and that directly or indirectly, he sent down word to Greene that she would not have her hero’s support.

The bitterness of Greene’s rant, and the language she chose, provide supporting evidence for that theory. She complains about the GOP elites, sucking down booze “at the country clubs and Mar-a-Lago,” and lashes out at what she calls “the political consultants embedded in the White House,” who allegedly manufacture polls reflecting what the elites want to see.

I suspect another set of fingerprints would also be on the knife that found Greene’s back. That would be those of Gov. Brian Kemp. He acknowledged speaking with Trump early last week about his own decision not to run for Senate and about the need for Republicans to come together to support a candidate who could unite the party and succeed statewide.

That does not sound like a description of Marjorie Greene.

Greene seems to have similar suspicions. In her diatribe, she attacks “the ultra-rich Kemp donors gathering last weekend at their elite retreat on luxurious Sea Island to anoint their candidate to run against Jon Ossoff…They’re trying to carefully select someone who can dress up in MAGA just enough to trick the grassroots into thinking they’re one of us.”

“These are the Republicans who see Trump as a speed bump, one they believe they can carefully roll over now that he won’t be on the ballot again,” she said.

Frankly, there’s some truth to that analysis. Kemp’s greatest success as a two-term governor, his most important legacy, is not policy-based. Instead, it has been his ability to keep the Georgia Republican Party largely within the broad bounds of reason, logic and responsibility, a party that is still capable of governing. In the Trump era, it’s a trick that Republican leaders in other states have been unable or unwilling to accomplish, and the GOP has suffered in those states as a result. You can get away with outrageous stuff in Texas and Alabama that you cannot in Arizona and Georgia.

Kemp, to his credit, recognizes that. He has talked of wanting to leave the state and party as he inherited it from predecessors such as Nathan Deal and Sonny Perdue, one-time conservative Democrats who found success as conservative Republican governors. Kemp understands that if Georgia is now a purple state, as attested by its two Democratic senators, it would be much closer to outright blue today had GOP leadership succumbed to the mindless Trumpite populism that we’re now seeing play out at the national level.

Will Kemp, as a lameduck governor, be able to enforce that discipline through the 2026 election cycle? For the moment he seems to have an important ally in Trump himself, but the president is nothing if not fickle.

Just ask Marjorie.

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