Elaina Plott Calabro: MTG Is More Cunning than You Think

This

episode is brought to you by Samsung. Unfold the all new Galaxy z Fold four and expand your world. With flex mode, it stands on its own, so your hands free to get more done during calls. And with multi window view, you can use up to three apps at the same time. Plus the edge to edge screen allows you to fully immerse yourself in your favorite games and shows.

Visit samsung dot com to learn more about Galaxy z Fold for.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bulwark podcast. I’m JVL sitting in for Charlie Sykes, who is off on vacation, on holiday, having a lovely old time in France. And I am joined today by somebody I’ve never met before, but have been reading for a long time. Elena Calabrio of the Atlantic, we’re gonna talk about Elena’s gigantic profile of margery Taylor Green in a couple minutes.

I’m sure you all know her work. I think as a piece of trivia, I don’t know if you know this Elena, but I believe you’re the only person ever to have spent time at national review and have written for the Pacific Standard.

Wait. That’s an amazing piece of trivia. I’ve never thought about it that way, but I have to imagine that’s correct.

Yeah. So that’s a very uniform, basically.

I have a uniform.

So Elena has a giant profiled margarita Taylor Green in the Atlantic this month. And we’re gonna talk about that for most of the show, but I wanna start with The big news from Josh Marshall’s talking points memo last night, they got a hold of two thousand or so of Mark Meadows text from in and around January sixth. And they published, you know, the first tranche of them last night. And what they did is the the first tranche is all elected Republicans texting back and forth with Mark Meadows. And I I’m gonna just lob a couple lots of balls up here for you, Elena, and you just take swings at him.

November five, representative Mark Greene of Tennessee who is watching NewsMax evidently texts the chief of staff of the White House and says that Dick Morris is saying a state legislature can intervene and declare Trump the winner. On November sixth, the next day, representative Brian Babin of Texas says, Mark, when we lose Trump, we lose our Republic. Fight like hell and find a way. We’re with you here down here in Texas and refused to live under a corrupt Marxist dictatorship. Liberty Babin.

He signs his name to it, not understanding that the text also has his name at the top of it. Right. Yes. We didn’t have representative Greg Murphy who his reading stuff from revolver. Just copy pasting and texting the chief of staff and say, why aren’t we doing this?

And the best is representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who on January seventeenth, so this is eleven days after the insurrection three days before Biden’s inauguration. Text Mark Meadows and says Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly and reading about the Dominion lawsuits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation, we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic double exclamation point. Our last hope all caps is invoking martial law, martial spelled like George Marshall, or throat throat, martial, or martial to college. Please urge our president to do so. Elena, do you have thoughts?

I do

have thoughts. I mean, the first thing I would say is having been so enmeshed in margery Taylor Green’s world for the past two months and kind of enduring the mental and emotional damage that has come with that. My first thought was, well, Marjorie Taylor Green was the first one to recommend Martin Meadows calling for Marshall Law also spelled like George Marshall. So I just wanna kind of make that clear that we don’t steal her thunder a bit there, that she did do that first. No.

And all seriousness, actually, Jonathan, I so one, I’m also a huge fan of yours. I’ve been reading you for a long time. And I think it was either yesterday or the day before when you were talking about kind of Elon Musk’s brand of conservatism, which is just sort of very reflective, very hollow. There’s no sort of really ideological anchor there. And that is my first reaction when I’m reading the TPM tranche of text here is that this is kind of what the Republican Party has become today.

Right? This is a group of elected officials, many of whom have been in office a long time. I don’t know if you mentioned, I don’t think you did just reading now. But if you actually go through those texts, I mean, one of the representatives who’s kind of lobbying these insane ideas that Mark Meadows is Chip Roy of Texas who for a time was Ted Cruz’s chief of staff for a time was considered a quote unquote reasonable or Republican as far as they went on the more right side of the spectrum. But this has really come to engulf, I would say, a better part of the conference.

And again, to your point about sort of Elon Musk, this is all just reflective. They’re watching news maps. They’re watching you know, those sorts of outlets and just throwing pain at the wall and seeing what hits. There’s nothing, you know, principled or substantive that’s kind of guiding them as they, you know, navigate these first days of the New Year.

What struck me is that they don’t sound like elected officials. They sound like commenters on Breit Bart. Mhmm. I mean, for me, the biggest shock is that seeing big parts of the Republican establishment. It’s not that they’re not operating on the level of bill buckley.

Right? We do not often expect that. We don’t often see it. But they’re not even operating on the level of, like, Tucker.

Yes.

You know, like, this is much closer to gateway pundit.

I was

just like, wow. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with lawyers over the course of your life, but lawyers in general are the ones standing in the corner saying, no, you can’t do that.

Mhmm. Right.

You know, the lawyer is always the the the guy or the the gal’s saying, nope. Can’t do that. If you don’t know, if you do that, that’s dangerous. You could have some exposure. And here we have elected officials, some of whom were lawyers.

We have Johnny Smith and Sydney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, all the legal team, And they were approaching the situation with the exact opposite sensibility, not be, like, hedging, risk averse way, but, like, Is there any shred that we can find anywhere that’ll allow us to justify taking this radical set of actions? I don’t know. Maybe we shouldn’t care. We

should care. And the reason we say that is I think somebody had thought about often in the past couple of months is Steve King, the representative from Iowa who, you know, kind of in the pre Trump days and then into the first years of the Trump administration, Steve King was sort of considered by most Republicans that I would cover in the House GOP Conference as the crazy one. Right? The one who would spout off white nationalist talking points and whatnot, but everybody felt that they could safely ignore him because he was not an influential voice whatsoever within the comp friends. He was not raising a ton of money.

He had been there for a long time, yes, but he was not, you know, this kind of committee chairman, steering really important segments of the day to day life of Congress. But that’s changed now when you do have people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Jim Jordan, both of whom, you know, Jim Jordan will most likely be chairman of the judiciary committee next year. Marjorie Taylor Green should Kevin McCarthy become speaker will probably have a seat on the oversight committee. I mean, the people who are sort of channeling the more conspiratorial wings at the party now actually have a voice, have influence, and are raising a ton of money because of it. And for that reason, they can’t really safely be ignored anymore.

Yeah.

There are more of them and they have more popular support Right. I mean, this is the other thing. Like, Steve King, you know, had his people in in his district supporting him, but that’s sad. These other people have, like, national profiles. Right?

I’m sure you saw that Brett Kavanaugh went to a holiday party over at Matt Schlapp’s house. Mhmm. And Matt Schlapp is not the same. And like AEI or the Heritage Foundation.

Matt

Schlepp’s a guy who was on the ground in Arizona trying to overturn the election. K. And once upon a time, at the highest levels of, like, conservative intellectual elite, there would have been a sense that, like, look, this guy is too much and privately, I’m with him, but I can’t hang out with him social. And now that’s gone. Like, now it’s Jenny Thomas all the way down.

Mhmm. You know? And — Right. — I don’t know. This is we’re gonna get more of this, I think.

Because we are now eight days away from getting the January sixth committee report. Do you have thoughts about the January sixth committee. These are the last two things, and we’re gonna go to Marjorie Taylor Green. Do you have thoughts about just sort of global thoughts about the January sixth committee itself? And whether it mattered?

I think

it’s a great question. And I actually, to be perfectly honest, Jonathan, don’t really know the answer to the extent that it matters whether, you know, the American public takes it seriously to the extent that it meaningfully changes the electoral map. And I guess I say that because I think that there were a lot of really optimistic takeaways from the midterm elections with people saying, you know, Americans have signaled that they’re tired of the crazies. That the general electorate does care about democracy is taking seriously the themes that are being introduced in something like the January sixth committee. My more pessimistic takeaway though is what we saw in the midterms this year is that nothing about the Republican primary voter has changed.

It may be that independence and, you know, more centrist Republicans are happy to turn out during the general election and not vote for somebody like say Hersha Walker, but that it’s not the case with the Republican primary voters. Every day you see headline, I feel that says something like Republicans have a Trump problem. Well, no. Republicans have a voter problem right now. And just because somebody like Kerry Lake or Blake Masters lost their elections in Arizona.

I’m not convinced that the Republican primary voter is seeing that and seeing that as a reason to not vote for similar candidates in the next primary and to tie that into the January sixth committee. I mean, I think in terms of who most Americans should want that committee to make an impression upon. I’m not sure the Republican primary voter who is the engine of the GOP right now is going to be meaningfully influenced by the report.

So this is actually a great segue to Marjorie Taylor Green because there is, on the one hand, history is contingent. And on the other hand, you can see Trump as a symptom, not a cause. But the specific case of Mars retailer Green, I think, makes all of that sort of muddled up. And I I wanna dig down and just sort of get to that as we go. Every once in a while, we get a figure in conservative politics like a Sarah Palin or a Michelle Bachman or Alan West, and the base falls in love with Emma.

I texted you before we got on on the show. A national review cover story on Michelle Bachman from back in the day in which The headline was daughter of Liberty. It’s a portrait of her, like she’s either Reagan or Washington, and the funniest bit of that. I don’t know how close you looked at it, but the story is written by Bob Costa. Oh,

wow. Yeah. Oh, I didn’t notice that. Wow.

Back in the day. And sometimes those figures burn real bright and then fade away the way Michelle Bachman did. And down west in his own way. But sometimes they jump in the mainstream like new Cambridge. That’s what Cambridge was basically.

And at the The heart of everything we talk about with MTG, I want people to sort of keep that in their mind. You know, which of these pathways is she? And I wanna start with some audio of Marjorie Taylor Green at the New York Young Republican Gayla, which can you imagine going to that if you didn’t have to for your job. And it is theoretically not a place for insane people. This isn’t like, you know, a clan rally in Alabama.

Then January sixth happens. The next

thing you I organized the whole thing along with Stephen in here.

And I don’t

tell you something. I just Stephen and I had organized that. We would have won.

That’s

a mission. It would have been armed.

I guess.

Yeah.

I wanna start at the macro and then we’ll zoom into the micro. What does her future look like?

Her future in so far as house Republicans remain in power, I think, is quite right. I’m gonna go back to something I mentioned briefly earlier which is that Marjorie Taylor Green raises a lot of money. She is not somebody like Steve King who Kevin McCarthy can safely ignore. She, within the first few months of being in the House GOP Conference, was raising almost as much money as leadership, and she was not taking corporate PAC donations. The small dollar donors love margery Taylor Green.

And I’m glad that you brought out Jonathan this idea that people kind of firm brightly in the party and then sort of fade out. And I think that does happen in the context of a national campaign. We saw that with somebody like Scott Walker or even, you know, Bobby Gentle. I mean, people whose names that you don’t even really remember anymore. But Marjorie Taylor Green, as long as she stays a member of the House Republican Conference.

I think her future is very bright in terms of the influence she will wield I mean, Kevin McCarthy identified pretty early that if he wanted to secure the speakership, which by the way, I should say that This is the third time in my admittedly brief adult life that Kevin McCarthy has come on the cusp of the speakership and is still having issues. Kind of landing the plane. But should he actually do that? I mean, he he’s identified pretty early that Marjorie Taylor Green is for him, a crucial link to the outermost right flank of the party. So as long as he’s speaker, I don’t see that changing in any meaningful way.

She will be installed on the oversight committee again assuming he gets the gavel. And she’s made very clear and I take her very seriously when she says this that she wants immediately to launch investigations into people like Hunter Biden, various cabinet secretaries, This is a woman who has filed, I think, no fewer than five impeachment resolutions against Joe Biden. So this is not somebody who kind of says what she needs to say to get elected and then sort of, you know, fades into the background to work on appropriations bills. No. She will try to do all of these things as soon as the new Congress takes over in the new year.

And again, as long as she does a kind of break out two years later and forgo a reelection campaign to try, say, I don’t know, to run as Donald Trump’s running mate or something to that effect, I do think her feature is quite stable and quite bright. I

mean, there’s tension here, which is to the base, she’s Elvis. And to the Republican elites, they regard her as at best a dangerous full. I mean, they they don’t like her, you know, Mitch McConnell. You have a great line for Mitch McConnell in in your profile for her. I forget what it is off the top of my head.

As you said earlier, the Republican Party has a voter problem and she doesn’t need Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, but they need her. And so I I don’t think that dichotomy can last. I think eventually the elites will have to accept her. Just don’t know that they have a choice. Well,

and I think to a large degree it’s already happened. I would urge viewers to go find a clip at this moment, but I don’t know if you saw Jonathan the other day during the congressional gold medal ceremony for the Capitol Hill police officers who had kind of endured January sixth and you have at the front of the room all of congressional leadership that is to say, you know, I think speaker Nancy Pelosi was up there Mitch McConnell was, Kevin McCarthy was, Chuck Schumer was, and these police officers and their spouses are going down the line shaking the hands of these leaders of Capitol Hill. And as soon as they get to Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy, Mitch McConnell has his handout stretched They just totally ignore them, totally bypass them, do not even acknowledge really the existence of Mitchell McConnell and Kevin McCarthy. What I thought was interesting was that Kevin McCarthy didn’t even put his hand out. It was as if he kind of knew they’re not going to acknowledge me.

But Mitch McConnell tried really hard to, I guess, express his appreciation or try and shake their hands, but was not successful. And there was something in his expression Jonathan that led me to think how much longer is he going to endure this? I mean, this is someone who, I mean, to be fair, as far as we know, has not had a conversation with Donald Trump since December twenty twenty. He was not like Kevin McCarthy in that right after January six he went down to Mar a Lago to break bread with him. At the same time, he is for better or worse lumped in with this group now because people like Kevin McCarthy do more so represent the heartbeat of the GOP.

And just again, the expression on Mitch McConnell’s face, I mean, I just had to wonder Are these people thinking about their legacies at any point now? And, you know, what it will mean that they’re not going to be remembered as necessarily for the fact that they didn’t have a conversation with Donald Trump after January sixth. They’ll be remembered for the fact that they were part of the Republican Party and had a position of leadership. And perhaps we’re not more adamant about expunging this element from the party. I

have to disagree. I I think that their calculations are that legacy stuff doesn’t matter. All that matters is power. And in the future, at the most, these guys get one line in Wikipedia anyway. And if you’re if you become the speaker of the house, then your one line in Wikipedia is that you’re a former speaker of the house and everything else gets airbrush.

I think the the clearest way to read them is that they’ve decided that powers what matters. And from there, I mean, if you want to give them the most charitable reading, then their view would be The reason they want powers because they want to enact policies, which they think will help the the common good. I don’t agree with it, but that’s probably the most charitable way of viewing it. From

the best

selling author of winner’s take all comes the persuaders. An insider account of activists, politicians, educators, and everyday citizens. Working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy. Written and read by awards winning former New York Times columnist, Anand Gjerdadas. The persuaders is available everywhere books and audiobooks are

sold. Looking for the

perfect gift for that special someone or for that person who is impossible to buy for. Massage Luxe has the perfect solution. Who would not appreciate some me time? Give the gift of relaxation this year. Purchase a one hour standard massage or facial gift card of massage luxe and get one free.

To learn more, go to massage luxe dot com. That’s massage l u x e dot dot com. So the

the question your piece asks is, how does Marjorie Taylor Green happen? And you went all the way back like so many of our populist heroes from the right, like Trump and Tucker and Elon Musk, she grew up rich. So could you give me just

the I don’t know. The

the short version of the backstory just bringing her up through into her adulthood.

Because you also got

a hand of her high school yearbook, which was amazing, and I loved all that stuff too. Yeah,

absolutely. So, Marjorie Taylor Green grew up in Foresight County, Georgia. That itself has an interesting backstory, which we can go into later. But basically, she Gross out kind of in the northwest suburbs of Atlanta. Her dad owns a pretty successful construction business.

And she’s, you know, she has a lake house. She’s she’s never really known want necessarily. And by all accounts, she’s a pretty, you know, normal middle schooler, high school school or part of things like the Spanish club and the soccer team. I mean, nothing to suggest the kind of person she’s going to become. She goes off to the University of Georgia for four years, majors in business, meets her husband there, or I guess now soon to be ex husband, but meets Perry Green there and sort of undertakes and I say this is somebody from the south, you know, a pretty typical road for generally well off white southern women, which is going to the four year college in your state, marrying the man that you start dating there and then start having kids become part of things like the junior league and whatnot.

I don’t think that Marjorie Taylor Green was specifically a part of the junior league, but you catch my drift. They lived in Alpharetta. So again, staying in the suburbs of Atlanta, had, you know, sort of a McManchin by the third kid. They both worked for the father’s construction company. And it is, by all accounts, just a very, very quintessentially normal American suburban life.

You know, at a certain point, she kind of breaks and starts to feel that this business that she’s been raised up to inherit is not actually all that interesting to her. She doesn’t show up to work that much. She doesn’t express, you know, much of a passion for it. By the time she turns forty, she has gone off in search of other things to anchor her and fulfill her. You know, it’s

funny as I’m reading your piece. I kept thinking to myself that this is basically the maga version of eat, pray, love. Yes. It is it is a a woman who is trapped in a life that just isn’t working for her. She doesn’t seem super into motherhood.

She doesn’t seem to be super into her spouse. She sure doesn’t like her professional life, but she doesn’t know what else there is. And so she goes, you you you have a great phrase in this. You said she began her life began to assume the dull cast of malaise. You could also read this as like us nineteen seventies, feminist tracked to, like, you know, what was the feminist geek?

Was that the sort of a the the Betty For Dan version, but the topian version. Yeah. That’s the

idea. Where instead

of becoming liberated, you become an authoritarian

institution.

That was in the deluxe version of the book. Yeah.

Yeah. And so she she gets restless and she tries on a bunch of things. And she starts with Jesus, and then gets into CrossFit, then gets into QAnon, and then finally, Magna. I

just wanna

sort of, you know, hop through each of these parts of the journey because I think they each tell us something about her. And the first is is the Jesus stuff. So she is raised Catholic, which surprises me just because it’s the south and, you know, you can go a long way without finding like in

the south. Yeah. Absolutely. So she goes to this large

non denominational church and she gets baptized and then just sort of walks away from it. You have a great line. Who was it who you talked to? Who when you interviewed him said, you know, Brad Ravensburger has been an active member church for a long time, but nobody ever asks me about him. That

was an official

from the church who I agreed to give anonymity to talk to me about Margery Taylor Green’s time at the church, but I’m so glad you brought up the Catholicism because that was pretty fascinating to need to and because she would not talk to me. For this story, I had a pretty the one encounter I had with her when I finally was able to find an event that she was at in Georgia, She yelled at me and called me a Democrat activist, and I asked her what she had read that I had written, that I’d given her that impression. And I said, because that’s troubling to me. You know, if you if you’ve read my work and you think I’m a Democrat activist, you know, I would really love to know what specifically gave you that sense. And she goes, well, I, you know, I’ve read your stuff and you are a Democrat activist.

And I said, no, Congresswoman. Can you tell me specifically what has given you that impression. And she said, well, I can’t just, you know, come up with something off the top of my head and it was just the most bizarre exchange. I mean, she’s clearly, you know, never read anything I’ve written and at first was angry at me that I was only then trying to come to talk to her even though her communications team had basically told me politely to go screw yourself a million times, but then said that the reason they had said no was because they weren’t interested did in talking to me. So I don’t know.

It was all just very, very strange. But because of that and, you know, I’ve profiled a bunch of people, a lot of whom I have had that kind of act access to. I did not have the chance to sort of ask her, tell me more about your upbringing and your Catholicism, and The only thing I can think because like you said, it it is pretty rare in the south for a family to be devout Catholic and her father was originally from Michigan. And I have wondered if he was raised Catholic and sort of brought it down with him to Georgia. But that that’s really the best sense I can get.

Her logic and she has said this in retrospect was that once she became a mother, she couldn’t countenance sort of all the scandals within the Catholic church, especially with priest and, you know, altar boys and all of that. And so she really wanted to change denominations. And she finds this megaturch in Alpharetta, which to be clear, is a really wonderful church. It is steeped in the gospel, the pastor, Andy Stanley, you know, I’ve read a lot of his work. Really, really, I think wonderful Christian teacher.

And she gets baptized there in twenty eleven becomes really, really deeply involved in the church for three years and then essentially drops off from there. And I think this becomes the start of a pattern, Jonathan, that we see with her life. She finds something and she cleans to it really really intensely, like, oh, I finally found my anchor. I finally found the thing around which I can orient my identity. And then it’s kind of like a shooting start, just sort of, you know, fades out pretty quickly.

And she moves on to the next thing. So there’s Christianity. And then as she said she goes on to CrossFit.

Don’t let your

team’s best ideas get lost after your brainstorm is over. With lucid Spark’s virtual whiteboard, you can connect with your team on an infinite canvas, create living documentation your stakeholders will actually use. Bring clarity to your brainstorms with voting, sticky notes, and emoji reactions, and collaborate visually to drive projects forward. Make visual collaboration your competitive advantage. Try lucid Spark for free at lucid Spark dot com slash Spotify.

Why is Sylvan

learning different? It’s simple. Sylvan works. So many families try other solutions, but they always end up with Silvan. That’s because Silvan’s team of dedicated local educators have decades of experience at helping students succeed.

And Sylvan is backed by proven programs with guaranteed results. This school year will be different because you started with Sylvan. Tap the banner to learn

more. You

know, in in theology, they call people like the seekers. Right? People who are moving and you see goodness knows. You see people who hop through, like, seven different religions in, you know, in the course of their their journey. It’s because they’re seekers.

Right? They’re looking for for new

things.

And when she moves from board again Christianity to CrossFit, it sounds like a a non secular but I actually think it makes total sense. Because to some extent, Christianity is about identity as much as it is about theology or spirituality. And there are some people for whom the identity part of it is what really brings them along. And I don’t know if you had conversations with people in her church about this, but it you know, reading your account of it. It sounds to me like it’s the identity version of the Christianity which attracted her.

And CrossFit can fill that same hole And I don’t think people understand how into CrossFit she was. Like, there were a lot of jokes about her in CrossFit when she first came to Washington and people goofed on it, but she was fully into the CrossFit cult. Was she not? Oh, yes.

And I do wanna say something briefly before we go fully into CrossFit. I’m sorry. Are you a

CrossFit person? Oh my god.

No. No. No.

I’m calling it cult, but I I should be nice about it.

No. No. But I am a Christian, and I wanted to echo what you said about how Identity is a huge part of it because you are finding your identity as a son or daughter of Christ. The difference is the the teaching is that that that identity is supposed to be enough for you. And, you know, that is a perennial struggle of Christianity, you know, as fallen people We do have trouble.

We are not all like Paul who can find joy even when our circumstances are crumbling around us. But the idea is that our identity is supposed to be rooted so deeply into Christ that we don’t have to keep seeking in that way. But you know, she, like so many other people, had trouble with that, but that path led her to crossfit. And what it led to her doing is essentially, I think, supplementing the identity that she had found in this Christian community with the CrossFit community. And I don’t think cult is too far off a way to describe something like crossfit.

Because the people who get really into it, I mean, it does become their whole life. And you’re right. She was not just sort of somebody who went to work out a few times a week and hang out with gym buddies on the weekends. I mean, At her peak, I think it was she was ranked forty seventh in the world in her age group among women. She was really, really intent on trying to compete.

I think it was called the CrossFit Games, which is sort of their Olympic version.

The CrossFit Games. Yeah. She was at a very, very high level of this and then she started her own gym. Yes. Like, I

mean, this

is what it is what I say was called again. I have friends who do CrossFit. I don’t mean to cast these versions on it, but her experience with CrossFit was not like she found a gym she really liked and went there every day. Exactly. It

was like she

got into the CrossFit games and then got so deep she became an instructor and then decided she was gonna open her own gym. Like, that’s a lot. That’s a whole lifestyle. Exactly.

It it’s a lifestyle. It’s not something you have in addition to the other things going on in your life. Right? You know, it’s not the hobby that you do when you get off at work at five PM or before you go in at seven AM or whatever. This was an every day, all encompassing thing for her.

It was her all of her friendships basically at that time were born out of CrossFit. Her community really was anchored in that gym. And because of that, basically, every trial and tribulation she went through in her life at that period of time was filtered through CrossFit. So I just wanna make clear to listeners that this is not just you going to walk on the treadmill to watch stranger things. I mean, this is who she is.

It’s

amazing. And this is I don’t wanna spend too much time. This is where her marriage starts break up. There are plenty of reasons to look down on larger Taylor Green. I I don’t wanna do that.

So it’s as she is exiting this cross fit, moment that she begins to ask herself, why not me? And we know this because she had a blog. Of course, she had a blog. And you went and found her old blog. And it really does sound like she was journaling like self discovery.

In a very earnest and open way.

Yeah. So the premise of this blog I discovered was that in preparation for the CrossFit games or in trying to qualify for the games, she had hired a coach. And this coach had her start this blog. It was public, but it was sort of just for him to sort of review each week. He would give her workouts to do that week and kind of like a diet and things like that.

And she would journal basically how it had gone for her, how what her experience was like with each workout. How each diet worked for her and things like that. But as the post go on, she starts to get more into kind of her circumstances more broadly. She gets much more personal and diaristic about what’s going on with her life and the quote you pulled was really striking to me because that was from a post when I think she had had a pretty hard day of workouts where you know, she was not quite meeting the times and the pace that she wanted and she’s struggling with these negative thoughts that she says she keeps having. And she said that confidence is something I’ve always struggled in, and I’ve finally decided to start saying, why not me?

And by this, she means, you know, why can’t I be the one who is number one and who goes out there and gets it? And I think keeping that quote in mind was very constructive for me as a reporter as I started going through the subsequent stages of her life, including Q1 on for sure.

Then we get into the queuing on stuff. Mhmm. How does that happen? How did she first started bumping up against that? I mean, it seems like she was had this sort of personality type that was open to conspiracies, which, you know, to be clear, many people have.

That’s not, you know, this is not, you know, looking down on her in any specific way for that? No. I think I think

that is such an important point, Jonathan, and that is another thing that I was excited talk about in this podcast because we do, you know, have more time than I do on the cable news hit, which is that there’s a reason why midlife crisis is a cliche. Right? You know, every human being is, like, kind of, you know, looking for the thing to give them purpose. And Marjorie Taylor Green was no different from any other human being in that respect. But this is what I think decades from now in retrospect, we will look back at this time and see the advent of something like QAnon as, you know, one reason this world kind of went Haywire because when you have these millions of people seeking and then you suddenly have the presence of you know, a much more involved social media, a much more kind of widespread hub for conspiratorial thinking that’s being accepted by the way in the mainstream by the soon to be president of the United States.

It shouldn’t surprise us at all that so many people fall prey to it. A big reason for that is because the way that most people find it and the way that Marjorie Taylor Green found it was through Facebook. God, of course. Yeah. So based on my reporting and people who were close to her at the time and interacted with her on Facebook at the time, the save the children hashtag was very influential for her.

And the save the children for people who might not remember was this idea that it’s kind of the core of Q and M, which is the idea that the world is controlled by a satanic cabal of pedophiles. So the Roth childs and, you know, George Soros and Hillary Clinton with her

frazzled grip. Right.

Exactly. And, you know, the idea that companies like Wayfair are sex trafficking children and rolling them up in their rugs. And, you know, that is sort of the heart of it and that’s what things like PizzaGate rollout of. But basically, she clicks on that hashtag and the way I envisioned it as I was reporting It was almost as though like a portal opened for her and she just stepped through and her world was never the same after that. This

gets us to that question that I said at the very top. Is Trump a symptom or a cause? And, you know, in general, My view has tended to be that he’s a a symptom. You know, Trump doesn’t happen unless the culture is already a certain way. But, you know, as with everything in life, with these dualities, the answer is both.

And if you look at Trumpism as a third great awakening, only again like a dystopian version of the great awakenings. I don’t know that Marjorie Taylor Green gets radicalized fully and fully activated without him. I

think that’s absolutely right because, again, to this thing we’ve been talking about over and over, nothing really about the broad contours of Q and A, which is to say, conspiratorial thinking or, you know, beyond that racism and anti Semitism. None of that is new. In this country. I think what happens in twenty sixteen and then into his presidency is that people who are sympathetic with those viewpoints, finally have the leader of the free world to attach those views to. And say, oh, wow, I actually have a president of the United States who is affirming every single thing I believe.

And it’s important, I think, to reckon with the power of that for supporters of his and how it emboldens people to double down on those beliefs and not shy away from them in, say, this idea that, you know, well, I’ll just kind of play on my computer at home, but in polite society, I will spur these ideas. When the leader of the free world is a vehicle for the things you already believe, you no longer feel a need to do that anymore. You

write in your post that she welds power much like Donald Trump doing or saying the unthinkable because she knows that most of her colleagues wouldn’t dare jeopardize their own future to stop her. And my theory, and I’m interested to hear what you make of this, is that part of the reason she has such power with the base is because she

really is authentic. That

she’s she’s not I mean, you know, like Ted Cruz, God love him, doesn’t believe any of this stuff, but he goes out and we’ll do it, you know, to the moon, and people smell that. You know, like, they can smell a Ted Cruz. They can they can even smell, I think, to a certain degree of Rhonda Santos.

But

with Marjorie Taylor Green, I would not say that she is imitating Trump’s style. I would say that she simply has the same makeup, like that’s sort of who she is. Agree or no? Yes. I agree.

And I think even better than Ted Cruz as an example for comparison, think about somebody like senator Josh Holly put the two of them side by side. Senator Josh Holly is somebody who graduated from Yale Law who is kind of the self fashioned intellectual and recognizes that the kind of queen on version of the party is here to stay and tries to play into that. Compare the way that he interacts with voters and the way he sounds and his affect on stage was somebody like Marjorie Taylor Green. And there’s no comparison essentially. Marjorie Taylor Green is really the real deal.

When she’s campaigning for the first time in twenty nineteen in her Georgia primary in the fourteenth district there, Nothing that she’s saying is contrived or coming from a place of working with multiple focus groups and seeing what tests well with Trump’s face. It’s just actually who she is, and it’s a huge part of the reason why she resonates the way she does. Yeah. It’s

very powerful stuff. But on the other hand, I do wonder, like, how does she achieve escape velocity? Because it is one thing to win a district in Georgia And it’s another thing to win statewide. And, you know, Georgia has a reasonably powerful business establishment in place in the Republican circles, which is why Brian Kemp was able to to survive and hang on. Like, where does she go next?

Does she go right to Trump twenty twenty four running mate? Does she if Trump decides to go third party, does she go with him? What is

what is her

sort of next step? I don’t see

a future for her right now outside of the house. I mean, at the minute she decides that she wants to flirt with statewide office or the senate. I don’t, for the moment, see that happening. I mean, Hersha Walker for all his flaws was true enough or was able to listen to his campaign to the extent that he didn’t want her campaigning with him. And she actually said recently to Steve Bannon, how insulted she was by that.

But, you know, even his team member for all the things that he said that we might classify as, you know, just totally off the wall. He did not want her anywhere near him. So right now, she does not have a future in that sense. But rather than getting caught up and what her next step is and why she can’t go anywhere, I think it’s more appropriate just to focus on in her lane right now, she can go as far as she wants. That is to say, on powerful committees, wielding levers of power, which do exist in the House of Representatives, and what sort of damage she can do from that.

I think one point I’d wanna know, which I don’t think that most people know is that actually her chief of staff is, you know, a former top official for Tom Delee. And I say that to say that she’s shrewd enough to know that she doesn’t want to just be a talking head on Steve Bannon’s war room or on Fox News or anything like that. She actually wants to accomplish things. And she has tried to pull in a staff who, you know, know the geography of congress such that she can accomplish those things. And I think that’s what matters and what should be focused on right now.

So that sets her apart from

a guy like Matt Gates. Right? I mean, Matt Gates is

basically headed towards having

a show on LA someday. But she has figured out that she can’t run for senator governor, but that she can weld power within the

house if

she works real hard at it. And that’s interesting because she does seem to combine two very powerful things. The the first of which is that she is, as as you say, comfortable in her own skin, which is like the most powerful political attribute any candidate can have. You know, whether what you are is good or bad, being totally comfortable with it is really powerful. But as you

say,

she’s also more cunning than you would think for somebody who, you know, is just like a cross fit weirdo. Absolutely.

I mean, she really is. In many ways, a competent person. I think a good example is I was actually surprised by how many people didn’t realize this before they read my story and reached out to me. She is not from Georgia’s fourteenth district. She, of course, is from the suburbs of Atlanta, which is Georgia’s sixth district.

And she had initially filed to, you know, run-in the Republican primary against Karen Haendel in that district. But the team that she had around her pretty quickly, disabuse her of the notion, basically, that she had a great shot there if she wanted to keep up all of her Q and ON posts and everything like that. Because, of course, a general consultant for a campaign has their own internal opco teams to kind of poke holes in their own candidate to see what they could be vulnerable on. So it wasn’t a surprise to people around her that she did have all of these crazy Facebook posts and things like that. She was just adamant that she was not going to delete them.

And what she did was instead of sort of reshaping herself to fit what a suburban, you know, leaning left voter in the suburbs of Atlanta would want. She simply found another district where that brand would fit better.

That’s so interesting. It’s such a great piece. Everybody should go go to the Atlantic and read it if you haven’t. We’ll we’ll put a link in the show notes for it. I would like to spend a couple minutes now just because I have you here and I love having writer talk whenever I get a chance to bring great writer in.

I said this to you when we’re the green room before it came on. I love you, but I also kind of hate you because you you are too good at writing too young and You and Olivia Nuzzi, you’re the two people I sit there, like, you know, jabbing needles into my my voodoo dolls with because you guys are so good, so young. And I assume that you just wanted to be a writer all your life. Is that true? Yeah.

It is.

In no small part because it was the only thing I was kind of good at. I’m very bad at math on the AP biology exam for one of the essay questions. I drew aham in Turkey. That was just not going to be my future in any way. But You are destroying

my spirit. I’m

so sorry. My mom read to me a lot. From a young age. She was a stay at home mom and all we did was read. And I did always wanna be a writer.

I didn’t know what kind, but I just liked writing. And when I got to college, I I went to Yale, and there was a journalism program there that I was able to take a class in and I just fell in love with it. And I specifically fell in love with profiling people. I mean, I just loved getting to know the stories of others. So I would say that that was what it kind of all spun out of.

Your

profiles are so good. But as I say in baseball, you hit to all fields with power. You can you can do reporting. You can do explainers. You did a great profile with my old friend Tucker.

Three months ago, two months ago. Just this week, you did a piece on the Russian hostage, Paul Whalen. What do you look for when you’re hunting for a story? What what are you looking for that makes you think I can get in there and find something.

I like to say that

the stories that interest me are more politics adjacent than actually about politics. One of my favorite pieces I’ve ever done is a profile of Heidi Cruz. And that is, of course, about politics. She’s the wife of Ted Cruz who, you know, is as much a mascot of American politics as anyone. But what that piece was really about was about marriage and womanhood and what it means to be a really successful person in your own right, but then see yourself in society kind of identified just as the wife of somebody else and how you grapple with that internally.

So I would say that the premise for a lot of my pieces do start with politics like Marjorie Taylor Green, for example, as a political figure. But I wasn’t really interested in the machinations of what she’s going to do when she gets power. As much as I was, culturally, how do we explain this person? How do we chart the rise of somebody like this? And that’s what gets me more excited than just the daily kind of blow by blow of what’s happening on the appropriations committee or something like that.

Yeah. The best politics

pieces are never about politics. Right.

I totally agree. Who are your writing heroes? I I gave you this question

before we got on because I didn’t wanna put you on the spot with it. Because when whenever I mask this, I always go, like, and I So who are your

heroes? You know, Jonathan, I would say that most of my heroes are fiction writers. In my spare time, I mostly read fiction and Fascinating. Tell

me more.

Probably right now, my hero, far and away, is Elizabeth Stroud. She wrote Olive Kitteridge that won the Pulitzer several years ago, but She just writes in a style that I’m always trying to emulate, which is, you know, very, very spare, never saccharin or indulgent and I love that about her writing just at a pure sentence level. But what I love about her books and I encourage everyone to read them because you’ll read them in a day. Is that they are about the most ordinary people you can imagine. They are not plot driven to the extent of there’s a really identifiable narrative arc from beginning to end with a climax in the middle and all of that.

She just writes about people that she comes up with. And their very ordinary lives. And the fact that she can make them so enthralling and have her prose just kind of just have me not being able to go to sleep at night because I can’t stop thinking about it is everything I would hope to accomplish in my own writing. Do you dabble in fiction yourself? No.

I I think I’d be so bad if I tried to write a novel. Really? Yeah. Can I try why not try? This is

I I feel the same way. I’ve you know, people have asked me, like, you know, oh, could you do a novel? And I just think to myself, that makes me, like, clench up and terror. How how would

I do that? No. It does

make me

clench up and terror. I don’t think I could do it. But at the same time, it’s like, look around us. Why would you need to try to make up something right now? I mean, it’s just all for the taking with the insanity we have to write about right now.

That’s real. Howard Bauchner: Alright. So last question.

So Jeff Goldberg has basically turned the Atlantic into the nineteen twenty seven yankees. It’s like you and Tim Alberta, both of the Apple albums and in Yoni, Caitlin Flanagan, Mark Liebovich, David from George Packard, Jen Senior, got Jen Senior so good. What is it like? To be part of a storied magazine as it is having a new golden age. I’m

just a

magazine lover, like, to

When I have nothing

to do, I’ll just go and grab something at random from the New Yorker archives to read. And the romance of Magazine Life to be at a place like the Atlantic is just amazing period, no even if you’re there during a fallow period. But to be there when things are are so good as they are right now. What is it like? For one, I mean,

it’s all inspiring. Yes, but it’s also very intimidating. Because you just have these, you know, legends in the making around you, like Jen’s senior, like Mark Liebovich, and you just hope that with every piece you, right, personally, that you’re not chipping away at kind of the aura that they’ve already created at the Atlantic and in some ways adding to it. I would say that the best thing about it is that you always feel like you’re learning from your colleagues. And I love that so much.

Mark and I went and grabbed a drink yesterday or the other day after doing a podcast. And I can feel like just in a fifteen minute conversation with him, I learned so much about writing and reporting. And to have that with colleagues that you also genuinely love as people is really, really special. That’s awesome. Well, it’s another

reason I can hate you. Elena, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down and talk with us. Thanks for being such a great writer and practicing your craft with so much care. Elena Platt Calabrio. I hope I got it right.

You did.

Staff writer of

the Atlantic and just one of my favorite writers. Thanks for being with us on the Bulwark podcast. I’m JBL in for Charlie Sykes. We’ll be back again tomorrow, and we’ll do this all over again.

You’re worried about the

economy. Inflation is high. Your paycheck doesn’t cover as much as it used to, and we live under the threat of a looming recession. And sure, you’re doing okay, but you could be doing better. The afford

anything podcast explains the economy and the market detailing how to make wise choices on the way you spend and invest. Avoid

anything talks about how to avoid common pitfalls, how to refine your mental models, and how to think about how to think. Make smarter choices and build a better life.

Afford anything wherever you listen.