Greene’s antics at the Alpharetta library, according to public records, internet archives and more than 50 interviews, amounted to an inflection point in a life story that suggests her seat in Congress is less the fulfillment of a dream than the culmination of a desperate, years-long search for an identity that fulfilled a yearning for affirmation and attention. After a decade marked by troubles at work and at home, adultery, palpable discontentedness and a consuming zeal for intense exercise and faddish nutrition, her roving craving for an audience found its ultimate outlet in right-wing online commentary and finally real-world, face-to-face provocation. Over the course of the last 10 years, she morphed from an affluent, all but apolitical, middle-aged attendee of an evangelical megachurch to an aspiring, publicity-seeking CrossFit persona to a right-out-of-the-gate hectoring lawmaker who now literally wears her grievance on the mask on her face.
Beyond the sometimes-seamy specifics, the origin tale of “MTG”—her increasingly tip-of-the-tongue, brand-name tag—isn’t just trivial or tabloid. On the contrary, it matters a great deal politically, explaining her electoral viability and her particular salience in the hothouse of the moment. She’s been called “Trump in heels,” and the analogy is apt: What Trump did in 2015 and ’16 to get to the White House provided a visceral template for what Greene did in ’19 and ’20 to get to Capitol Hill, as if his needy, spotlight-greedy ascent activated in her some smoldering set of latent genes…
“You can’t look away,” said Brian Robinson, an Atlanta-based Republican consultant who worked on the leading primary campaign against Greene. “She’s got presence, and there’s something that draws you to her. You never, never get bored—it’s always something interesting, and you might think it’s absolutely bonkers, but …”
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