Marjorie Taylor Greene: Controversies & Most Outspoken Moments

Five years ago, a few short hours before a mass of rioters breached the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — who had been sworn into office just three days earlier — cast her first major vote as an elected member of Congress, objecting to the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. Greene would spend the next five years embodying the worst impulses of the MAGA movement, helping make the Republican Party as conspiratorial and vengeful as it is today. Jan. 6 and its long aftermath were central to Greene’s time in office, and so it’s fitting that her last official day in Congress was on Monday, a day before the anniversary of one of the most consequential days in American history

Greene announced her resignation at the end of 2025 amid a public break with Donald Trump, ostensibly over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The Georgia representative built her career around her loyalty to the president, but is now trying to reframe herself as a contrite penitent, ashamed of her role as a fomenter of “toxic” rhetoric in one of the most socially and politically destructive movements in the nation’s history. As the now-former congresswoman ventures into retirement, and hopes people forget about all that stuff she did, here’s a look back at 10 of the most absurd — and, whether she likes it or not, career-defining — moments of Greene’s time in the House.

January 6

Greene’s ascent to GOP stardom was tied directly to her support for conspiracies claiming the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. The so-called “QAnon Candidate” won her first run for office the same year voters booted Trump from his. She quickly became one of the most prominent figures spreading conspiracies about the election, even writing on the night of the election that “we aren’t going to let Democrats STEAL this election.”

The newly elected congresswoman was billed as one of the speakers at the “Stop the Steal”rally the morning of Jan. 6, although she ultimately did not speak at the event. In the days after the riot at the Capitol, as the nation reeled from the attack, Greene texted then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that she and other members of the House “are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call Marshall [sic] law […] I just wanted you to tell [Trump]. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next.”

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Later in 2021, Rolling Stone reported that Greene had met with Jan. 6 organizers several times in the weeks leading up to the attack. Throughout the years that followed, Greene would become the leading congressional voice in the GOP’s attempts to rewrite the events of Jan. 6, and the most prominent advocate in favor of pardons for Jan. 6 defendants, which were granted upon Trump’s return to office.

“President Trump did the right thing in pardoning them,” Greene said in response to the pardons Trump issued after taking office last year. “The American people are sick and tired of everyone’s hyper focus up here in Washington. … They don’t give a damn about January 6th. They’re happy these people have their lives back.”

Masks = Holocaust

Greene entered office as the Covid-19 pandemic continued to wreck havoc in the United States and around the world. One of the first instances of culture war performance art adopted by the congresswoman was a petulant refusal to wear a mask while in the Capitol — resulting in a series of fines.

In May 2021, Greene compared the House mask mandate to the repression and murder of Jews during the Holocaust. “You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” Greene said. “And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

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It wasn’t, and the comparison was quickly condemned by Jewish groups and members of the Republican leadership. Greene doubled down, writing on social media that “vaccinated employees get a vaccination logo just like the Nazi’s forced Jewish people to wear a gold star.”

Greene would end up taking an educational trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where she ultimately apologized for the remarks. “I’m truly sorry for offending people with remarks about the Holocaust,” she said. “There’s no comparison and there never ever will be.”

Gazpacho vs. Gestapo

Greene’s impulse toward hyperbole often clashed with her chronic ignorance. In February 2022, the congresswoman appeared on the right-wing network One America News, where she accused former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of using a “gazpacho police” to spy on members of Congress and their representatives.

It seemed that Greene had confused the chilled vegetable soup often served in Andalusian summers with the Nazi Gestapo, the secret police force created by Hermann Göring as a tool of repression against dissidents and those targeted by the Nazi regime.

Greene has long had it out for Pelosi. In 2019, before her election to Congress, Greene suggested that Pelosi should be killed or imprisoned for committing “treason,” and once liked a post indicating she should be removed from office with “a bullet to the head.”  During her time in office, Greene often made the speaker emeritus a target of her screeds, even pushing Republican leadership to launch a DOJ probe into Pelosi.

Pelosi was neither exploiting soup or using her nonexistent secret police force to spy on members of Congress as she presided over the House during the pandemic, but the viral blunder was just one notch in a longtime obsession the congresswoman harbored against the House speaker.

Months later, Greene made a similar gaffe when she seemingly referred to a petri dish — the scientific tool used to cultivate biological samples — as a “peach tree dish” during a social media broadcast of her show MTG Live.

Allegedly Kicking a Teenager

In 2022, members of the activist group Voters of Tomorrow filed an ethics complaint against Greene after the congresswoman allegedly kicked one of their members outside of the Capitol.

The incident, which was captured on video shared by Greene on her social media, shows the representative being followed and questioned by members of the group, and seemingly kicking their Deputy Communications Director Marianna Pecora, who was 18 years old at the time.

Greene’s office denied that she kicked Pecora, and the congresswoman responded to the scandal by demanding that Santiago Mayer — a Mexican immigrant and founder of Voters of Tomorrow — “go back” to his country if he had criticisms of the U.S.

National Divorce

To Greene, many of the differences between the conservatives and liberal factions of U.S. politics were so irreconcilable, that the nation was better off splitting itself into independent territories.

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” Greene wrote in February 2023, ” Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

In the fall of that same year, Greene doubled down on her call for a national schism, writing on X that “if the Biden admin refuses to stop the invasion of cartel led human and drug trafficking into our country, states should consider seceding from the union.”

Of course, the last time the United States tried to rip itself into pieces over ideological differences (the right to enslave other people), the result was the bloodiest war ever fought on American soil.

Biden Controls the Weather

Before she even arrived on Capitol Hill, Greene had developed a reputation as a peddler of wild conspiracy theories and misinformation. Some of her most notable incidents — including “Jewish Space Lasers” and 9/11 conspiracy theories — took place before she was ever elected to the House.

But holding federal office was no deterrent to Greene’s conspiratorial proclivities. In October 2024 — in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which killed over 250 people throughout the southeastern United States and Caribbean — Greene claimed that someone (presumably former President Joe Biden and his administration)  intentionally caused the Category 4 storm.

“Yes they can control the weather,” Greene wrote on X in the days after the storm. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” While she did not explicitly refer to Democrats in that post, the congresswoman wrote in a separate post that “a map of hurricane affected areas with an overlay of electoral map by political party,”  showed “how hurricane devastation could affect the election. ”

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In May 2023, Greene was tasked with the rotating honor of presiding over the House floor during session. At one point, the Georgia congresswoman was met with loud laughter when she attempted to remind her colleagues that they were “to abide by decorum of the House.”

It wasn’t that she said anything particularly funny; it’s that Greene had by that point earned herself a reputation as the disrupter-in-chief of the House. Greene was notorious for getting into screaming matches with other members of the House, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.). Earlier that year, she made headlines after heckling Biden during his State of the Union address, yelling at him that he was a “liar” and chanting “Build the Wall.”

It’s like “Leonardo DiCaprio telling people to date people their own age,” Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-Calif.) wrote in response.

Not Safe for CSPAN

Republicans spent much of Biden’s time in office hunting high and low for evidence of the alleged international financial corruption in which they claimed the former president and his son Hunter were embroiled.

In the absence of hard evidence, Republicans turned to the salacious. In perhaps the most lurid incident in the Hunter Biden saga, Greene had barely censored images of Hunter engaging in sexual activities with various women blown up on large poster boards and displayed during a House Oversight Committee hearing.

“This is evidence of Hunter Biden making pornography,” Greene told the committee, as if filming a sex tape was a crime.

Greene went on to accuse Hunter Biden of having potentially engaged in sex trafficking under the Mann Act, which prohibited the transportation of “any woman or girl for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.”

Anything But Guns

Even before Greene came into Congress, Republicans had already established a pattern of deflection and minimization in response to mass shootings. During her tenure, Greene would practically trip over herself to muddy the waters surrounding a shooting with conspiracy and misinformation.

In 2022, in the aftermath of a shooting at a parade in Highland Park, Illinois, Greene suggested that the killings looked like they were “designed to persuade Republicans to go along with more gun control.”

“We didn’t see that happen at all the Pride parades in June, but as soon as we hit MAGA month, the month that we’re all celebrating, loving our country, we have shootings on July 4th,” she wrote. Greene also shared an obviously doctored image of the shooter, Robert Crimo III, and speculated that he was “in jail or rehab or a psychiatric center in this photo,” in an effort to blame the shooting on antidepressants.

Following the murder of 21 students and teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Greene helped spread baseless rumors that the shooter was trangender — one of the first major incidents in a now established pattern of Republicans attempting to pin extremist acts on “trans terrorism.”

“He clearly had a lot of mental issues going on, as was shown with him wearing eyeliner, cross-dressing, a lot of his language, being a loner,” Greene said of the Uvalde shooter.

One of Greene’s last acts as a member of Congress was to introduce an anti-transgender health care bill that would criminalize gender-affirming medical care for minors at the federal level. The bill passed the House in December.

Throughout her five year tenure, Greene prioritized attacks against the trangender community as a load-bearing pillar of her political platform. In 2021, after Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) hung a trans flag outside her office, Greene responded by posting a sign that read: “There are TWO genders: Male & Female. Trust the Science,” on her door across the hall.

In 2022, during an appearance on the far right media network Real America’s Voice, Greene accused Democrats of being “the party of pedophiles.”

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“The Democrats are the party of princess predators from Disney. The Democrats are the party of teachers, elementary school teachers, trying to transition their elementary school-age children, convince them they’re a different gender,” she said. Greene claimed that same year that the support and increased public presence of LGBTQ people was a harbinger of the extinction of straight people.

Late last year, as the House prepared to swear in its first transgender member of Congress, Rep. Sarah McBride (D-R.I.), Greene baselessly accused her new colleague of being “a child predator.”