'I'm doing everything right,' Marjorie Taylor Greene tells GOP gathering in Coeur d'Alene

Feb. 17—WASHINGTON — The Republican Party is in search of its next standard bearer as the race for the 2024 presidential election gears up, but at a GOP gathering in Coeur d'Alene on Feb. 11, one of the party's biggest political stars showcased the lasting influence of former President Donald Trump.

More than 1,800 miles from her northwest Georgia district, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene strode onto the stage in the same white fur coat she had worn to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address days earlier. She told the crowd the coat was meant to evoke the Chinese surveillance balloon that had floated over North Idaho skies at the beginning of February.

"I absolutely love President Trump," Greene said near the start of her nearly hourlong remarks. "I ran for office just convinced that — guess what — that he would be in the White House when I got to Congress. Well, then a little something happened called stolen elections."

From there, the Georgia lawmaker launched into a jovial stump speech she has honed since she was first elected in 2020, after she moved from the Atlanta suburbs to a deep-red district whose representative was retiring. Since then, she has toured the country and become one of the most prolific fundraisers in Congress, despite facing no serious Democratic challenger, but she said it was her first time in Idaho.

"I can't believe this is one county GOP," she told the crowd at the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee's annual Lincoln Day dinner. "I've been all over the country and I speak at a lot of events like this, and usually this will be the size of a district GOP event, but you guys are one county, so God bless you."

Greene came to Congress in 2021 on a populist platform infused with conspiracy theories about Jewish elites engineering the replacement of white people and starting wildfires with a laser orbiting Earth, among other things. She has capitalized on the backlash to those remarks to become a darling of the far right.

"A lot of people will say Marjorie Taylor Greene might be too confrontational, she might be too abrasive," comedian Alex Stein said as he introduced her in Coeur d'Alene. "But we don't have enough politicians that have the cojones that Marjorie Taylor Greene has."

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, then the House GOP leader, called Greene's comments "appalling" in 2020 and Democrats removed her from committees in 2021, effectively blocking her ability to legislate.

"All I've done is lost money since I got in Congress," Greene said, although she earns $174,000 a year and has raised more than $15 million, according to Federal Election Commission records.

"Apparently, I'm not doing anything right," she added. "Lost committees, lost money. Actually, it's because I'm doing everything right."

But earlier this year, she emerged as a key McCarthy ally in his marathon effort to become speaker, which he rewarded by appointing her to committees that promise to maximize her celebrity status. She now sits on the Homeland Security Committee, Oversight and Accountability Committee and Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

She told the crowd she plans to use those positions to present a different version of the riot by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. She has visited defendants charged for their roles in the riot at a D.C. jail she compared to a "prisoner of war camp."

"There is also a particular jail that we will be investigating on the Oversight Committee, and I am very excited to be leading that investigation," Greene said.

She promised "justice" for Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was shot and killed by a police officer as she tried to climb through a broken window to reach a hallway where lawmakers were fleeing the rioters. The Justice Department declined to charge the officer for Babbitt's death after determining he acted "reasonably."

"She was an unarmed veteran and she was murdered," Greene said. "And the man that shot her is walking around free."

In remarks before Greene spoke, Rep. Russ Fulcher, the Republican who represents North Idaho, praised the Georgia congresswoman and recalled a time when she intervened at the Capitol when a "very nefarious individual acting as a reporter really assaulted a female colleague of ours." Fulcher said that episode spoke to Greene's character.

"This last two years, with COVID as the excuse and media and social media as a tool, the Democrats have absolutely mounted a full assault on our republic," he said. "But last November, America sent some reinforcements, and what a difference a majority makes."

Fulcher celebrated the legislation the House has passed since Republicans took over the majority in January, including bills to cut funding to the Internal Revenue Service and limit a president's ability to use the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Most of those bills have no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate and would be vetoed by Biden.

Unable to legislate without compromising with Democrats, congressional Republicans have so far focused on sharp messaging. Perhaps no one among their ranks has embraced that role like Greene.

Orion Donovan-Smith's reporting for The Spokesman-Review is funded in part by Report for America and by members of the Spokane community. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.