How could Marjorie Taylor Greene make a comeback?

Originally published in The Los Angeles Times (11.22.25)

For this latest piece, I wanted to explore whether political trust can ever be restored after a legacy marred by falsehoods and deception. Is there anything someone like MTG can do to possibly redeem herself? Do we even have a way, or is permanent exile all we can offer?

Full article here, but feel free to DM if you’d like to get around the paywall. Thanks for reading.

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In a video posted to X late Friday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) announced she’d be resigning from Congress in early January, only halfway through her third term. Greene explained the decision in a direct-to-camera speech from her home, saying she’s “always been despised in Washington, D.C., and just never fit in” and suggesting that President Trump has tried to “destroy” her amid a weekslong feud between Trump and Greene over releasing the Justice Department’s files about the Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

“It’s all so absurd and completely unserious,” Greene said, citing personal attacks, death threats, slander and lies that have been told about her during her five years in the House. “I refuse to be the ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better.”

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Some will argue that applying this model to politics would let controversial figures like Greene off easy. It does the opposite. A system for restoring credibility would merely surface the data needed to evaluate whether future trust is reasonable. If the data reveals a lack of effort or consistency, that failure becomes part of the record. The goal is less to rehabilitate politicians than to rehabilitate judgment.

The real risk is that evidence here is predictive, not dispositive. No amount of completed tasks can prove genuine reform. But that’s the value of scale: At worst, even insincere efforts still benefit the community they’re meant to serve. The public park still gets cleaned, the town hall still gets held, the redress payment still gets delivered. What protects the integrity of such a system is the sheer accumulation of work that makes even self-interest socially productive.

Data is the only antidote to distrust. The challenge, then, is how to build a system that contains the greatest number of micro tests. The specific tests matter less than the consistent record they produce: a steady accumulation of follow-through that makes renewed trust a rational inference rather than a leap of faith. Until such evidence exists, whether Greene — or anyone in public life — deserves a second chance will remain a question we are forced to answer in the dark.