MTG Gives Her Party the Middle Finger Over Ongoing Shutdown
But Marjorie Taylor Greene stopped short of blaming Donald Trump.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is exhausted with Republican leadership as they fluster and flounder the government shutdown.
So far, the government has been shut down for more than eight days—the result of a boiling disagreement between Democrats and Republicans, left over from the spring, about how to fund Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget.
Republicans want to pass a “clean” continuing resolution, which would provide the executive branch with unfettered funds to advance the president’s agenda as outlined in his July legislation. That would include ruinous cuts to Obamacare subsidies and Medicaid, a position that Democrats have demonstrated for months is a nonstarter.
In the eight days since discussions broke down, conservatives have overwhelmingly blamed Democrats for the federal failure. But in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Thursday, one of the party’s most far-right figures argued that Republicans’ blame game won’t get them very far with the American public—especially as the GOP clutches every branch of the federal government.
“There’s a lot of things we can be working on in the House, and that’s our appropriation bills. There’s many other bills we could be passing right now,” Greene said on the paper’s podcast Politically Georgia.
“I don’t think it’s believable to tell the American people that while we control the White House, the House, and the Senate, that we can’t return to work in Washington, D.C., because Chuck Schumer and six other Democrats won’t vote to open the government,” Greene continued. “I know people. They don’t believe that.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson canceled chamber votes and sent lawmakers home earlier this month as party leadership works to negotiate with Democrats, but the decision hasn’t gone down well with members of his caucus.
“I’m against the [continuing resolution] and I’m for appropriations,” Greene said. “I really don’t see how we’ll ever pass the appropriations if we continue to sit at home and then we have another deadline coming on November 20.”
Beyond that, Republicans have failed to align their messaging on the shutdown, making for a messy public spectacle. Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have repeatedly flubbed attempts to coordinate their priorities with the White House, which has so far been more absorbed in punishing Trump’s political allies than in coming to a congressional resolution.
Still, none of Greene’s criticism was directed at Trump. Reacting in a separate interview to a Washington Post poll that found that the majority of Americans believed that Trump and Republicans in Congress were at fault for the shutdown, Greene said that she wouldn’t put the “blame on the president.”
“I’m actually putting the blame on the speaker and Leader Thune in the Senate,” Greene told CNN Thursday. “This should not be happening. As a member of Congress, we already have a low enough job approval rating. This shutdown is just going to drive everybody’s approval rating that much lower.”
The Georgia lawmaker has somewhat divorced herself from the MAGA brand in recent months.
Greene, who won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement, has publicly broken with Trump several times since his inauguration. She’s differed from her “favorite president” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to Russia’s assault on Ukraine, and has also sparred with the White House over the executive branch’s apparent hostility toward demands to release the Epstein files. Now she appears to vehemently disagree with Trump’s position on the shutdown, which has thus far involved a blame campaign that legal experts argue is in violation of the Hatch Act.