Despite Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s halfway attempt at walking back her love of conspiracies theories last week—ahead of having her committee assignments in Congress taken away—the Republican fire-starter continues to show she’s still someone who doesn’t belong in government, period.
On Tuesday, Greene took to Twitter—where her fellow profligate liar former President Trump has thankfully been booted—to push the latest big lie: that the insurrectionists who descended on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 while bearing Trump flags were not Trump supporters at all.
“If the #Jan6 organizers were Trump supporters, then why did they attack us while we were objecting to electoral college votes for Joe Biden?” Greene disingenuously began.
But it’s what she followed up with that illustrates how little regret she harbors for peddling the lie that President Biden didn’t win the 2020 election and that victory should have been given to Trump.
“The attack RUINED our objection that we spent weeks preparing for, which devastated our efforts on behalf of Trump and his voters,” said Greene.
The claim that the insurrectionists were not Trump supporters is obvious gaslighting, particularly since a number of the attackers charged in the violent Capitol break-in have gone on to attribute their actions to their avowed leader, Trump, for rallying them to fight against the election being “stolen.” Other members of the GOP have also tried casting doubt about the fact that Trump supporters led the Capitol attack, ultimately a transparent attempt to pretend they don’t know the kind of dangerous delusions their party has encouraged.
But we all watched what happened on Jan. 6, and we all know who exactly we saw storming the Capitol—mostly white people, from all walks of life, screaming ludicrous slogans like “Stop the Steal,” which Trump and Greene herself had promoted. The rally that preceded the insurrection was funded by deep-pocketed Trump supporters like the heiress to the Publix chain of supermarkets, Julie Jenkins Fancelli, as revealed by the Wall Street Journal. A recent New York Times analysis of cell phone data from Washington, D.C., on the day of the insurrection even shows at least 40 percent of smartphones that pinged at Trump’s rally earlier in the day then showed up at the Capitol—including inside the federal building.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of Greene’s anti-reality screed, however, is her commitment to pretending that the shameful actions of her and other Republicans in Congress who sought to deny the validity of Biden’s victory, thus fueling the actions of the similarly-minded insurrectionists, was tragically thwarted by the attack.
The insurrection didn’t devastate their shameful efforts at objection. Rather, it exposed how dangerous the craven lie driving the strategy was—since it contributed to the death of five people at the U.S. Capitol, including a police officer beaten by the blood-thirsty election deniers.
Greene went on to end her thread by calling Trump a victim and accusing Democratic policies of destroying lives and “stealing freedoms.” If Greene’s outrageous line of argument is an indication of what we will see during Trump’s impeachment trial, which begins in the Senate today, it suggests what we already knew: There will be no accountability or responsibility taken for the role Trump and his Republican enablers have played in creating a violently anti-government environment.