- Marjorie Taylor Greene said she and Trump have discussed her being his 2024 running mate.
- But she also acknowledged that her candidacy could be divisive, even for Trump.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia said she's discussed with former President Donald Trump the possibility of her serving as his running mate in a potential 2024 presidential bid, though she said the GOP establishment thinks she's too divisive.
Greene told New York Times reporter Robert Draper that she "would be honored" to serve as Trump's running mate. But she also appeared to recognize that Trump — not exactly a unifying figure himself — may need to run alongside someone with broader appeal in a general election.
"I think the last person that the RNC or the national party wants is me as his running mate," she told Draper in an excerpt of his forthcoming book, "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind." The excerpt, published in the New York Times Magazine, focused on the far-right congresswoman's trajectory within the Republican Party, going from a relatively marginalized figure upon her arrival in Washington in January 2021 to one of the party's most influential voices.
Despite being stripped of her committee assignments in February 2021 over her history of controversial and violent social media posts and past embrace of the QAnon conspiracy theory, Greene is now one of the most high-profile figures on the right, making frequent appearances at Trump rallies and playing a key role in the rollout of the House Republican's "Commitment to America" agenda.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has pledged to give the far-right congresswoman plum committee assignments if Republicans retake the House this fall, and the congresswoman herself even seems to recognize the power she has over the Republican leader, who hopes to become speaker of the House.
"I think that to be the best speaker of the House and to please the base, he's going to give me a lot of power and a lot of leeway," she told Draper of McCarthy. "And if he doesn't, they're going to be very unhappy about it."
Trump, for his part, is almost certain to seek the presidency again in 2024, but it remains unclear who might serve as his running mate and potential vice president, given his fraught relationship with former Vice President Mike Pence.
Despite facing a pressure campaign from Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election on January 6 — including facing a mob of the former president's supporters, some of which professed their desire to hang Pence — the former vice president ultimately did not do as Trump wanted. Pence has declared that Trump was "wrong" to suggest he had the ability to overturn the election.
"Frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president," Pence said in a February 2022 speech before the Federalist Society.