Dobbs) She Used To Make Me Gag. Now She’s A Profile In Courage.
Speaking out about Trump came with a price. They were willing to pay it.
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Last month I went to Denver to hear Adam Kinzinger speak. If the name rings a bell but doesn’t bring up a picture, Kinzinger is one of the ten House Republicans who bravely voted five years ago to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of insurrection. I say “bravely” because of those ten, only two are left in the House today. The others either lost their reelection bids or, when they saw the writing on the wall, didn’t run at all. That was the power of Donald Trump.
And then, in Trump’s eternally angry mind, Kinzinger committed an even more evil sin: a year later he joined Liz Cheney as one of the two House Republicans to scrutinize the seditious conduct of the then-ex-president on The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, better known as just the January 6th Committee.
Both Republicans were censured by the Republican National Committee for “participating in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Their patriotism cost them both their careers.
But neither has buckled under to the pressures of MAGA or to the temper of Trump. To the contrary, they are more outspoken than ever. They are profiles in courage.
At the outset of the January 6th hearings, Cheney made a profound pronouncement that will outlive Trump: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” On the day of Trump’s inauguration a year ago, he followed his Capitol speech with a second speech to a group of supporters, and told his same timeworn lies about the 2020 election and about what happened two months later on January 6th. So Cheney went after him again. “Neither lies nor the liar who tells them,” she wrote on X, “get better with age.”
Kinzinger, meanwhile, had the guts in 2024 to speak on the final night of the Democratic National Convention, after the Republican convention already had anointed Trump to run again. “The Republican Party is no longer conservative,” he told Democrats who he had spent his political life opposing. “It has switched its allegiance from the principles that gave it purpose to a man whose only purpose is himself. Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim.”
In the speech I saw in Denver, Kinzinger even as much as dared the president to come after him. When the moderator asked him about Trump’s vengeful and ultimately vain quest to hurt Senator Mark Kelly after Kelly told members of the military in a video that they do not have to obey illegal orders, Kinzinger looked straight into the audience and raised his voice and stiffened his arms and made sure his own position was crystal clear: “If you are in the armed forces, you do not have to carry out illegal orders!” Like Kelly, Kinzinger is a veteran combat pilot.
The thing is, although Adam Kinzinger’s voting record was not as conservative as Liz Cheney’s, who almost invariably voted the far-right position during her years in Congress, neither would have gotten my vote to return to office if I lived in their home states of Illinois or Wyoming. But today, I would take them in a heartbeat. They both have proved that they put principle ahead of politics. If heroism means sacrificing yourself for something greater, both are political heroes because of it.
Until recently, I thought they were the only ones. But lo and behold, maybe there are a few more. One is Kentucky Republican Representative Thomas Massie.
This is what I used to know about Massie.
Evidently taking a cue in 2021 from his right-wing House colleague Lauren Boebert, he tweeted this Christmas card of his family with the message, “Merry Christmas! ps. Santa, please bring ammo.” For me, that would be contemptible to tweet any day of the year, but this one went out just a few days after a school shooting in Michigan where a 15-year-old, armed with his father’s gun, killed four fellow students in cold blood.
But while Massie’s right-wing— he says “libertarian”— views on guns and most other issues probably haven’t changed, his fealty to his party and his president has. Among House Republicans, he was the angriest voice against the president’s failure to come clean and order the full release of the Epstein files. He told ABC News, “We can’t avoid justice just to avoid embarrassment for some very powerful men.” Then in a post on X aimed at Trump’s Department of Justice, he wrote, “THEY ARE FLAUNTING LAW.”
Trump resorted to his schoolyard bully persona, calling Massie a “lowlife Republican” for co-authoring a law requiring Justice to release the files.
Massie also has been a leading Republican voice, after the January raid in Venezuela, demanding a war powers resolution to stop the president from any further military action without the blessing of Congress. Asked by The New York Times about the U.S. invasion, he said, “I think it’s illegal and unconstitutional.” He accused Trump of “gaslighting” Americans on Venezuela.
What he has gotten for his trouble is a Trump campaign to “primary” him. The challenger Trump recruited raised more money in the last quarter than Massie.
The biggest surprise on the slow path to a profile in courage, though, is the transformation of longtime Trump acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is the two-term Georgia congresswoman who defied House rules and wore her infamous red hat to Trump’s first address in his second term to Congress.
That was less than a year ago.
Time was when I would almost gag at the thought of this woman— her nutty Q-Anon theories, her ridiculous remark that scientists control the weather with what she suggested were Jewish laser beams— “Yes, they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done”— her comments that the 2018 midterm elections were part of “an Islamic invasion of our government,” her tweet that “Joe Biden is Hitler. #NaziJoe has to go,” and most appalling, that she once referred to a “so-called” plane barreling into the Pentagon on 9/11, saying, “It’s odd, there’s never any evidence shown for a plane in the Pentagon.”
That was then. This is now.
After the assassination of Trump ally Charlie Kirk in September, when Kirk’s wife said at his memorial that her husband didn’t hate his opponents, Trump followed with, “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
It seems that that’s when Marjorie Taylor Greene had a “Jesus moment,” literally. “I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”
Almost on a dime, she did a 180, at least on Trump. She said his declaration at the memorial “was absolutely the worse statement.”
She already had called Israel’s war that Trump backed in Gaza “genocide.” She publicly objected to his policies on AI and cryptocurrency because they favored billionaires over average Americans. She opposed his tariffs because they hurt businesses in her district. She called for an extension of tax subsidies for Obamacare— a core issue for Democrats— which Trump opposed.
And maybe what got under Trump’s skin more than anything else was, she fought him on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, threatening to defy him by working with victims with whom she had bonded and by getting the names of men who had been in league with Epstein and making them public. She says the president phoned her and all but screamed, “My friends will get hurt.”
After Greene publicly broke with Donald Trump and he tagged her “Marjorie Traitor Greene,” she got death threats against her college-age son. She texted the president about it and told him that children should be off-limits. She says his callous response was, “You only have yourself to blame.”
There was a time when Trump sang Greene’s praises, posting in her first reelection campaign, “Marjorie Taylor Greene is a warrior in Congress. She doesn’t back down, she doesn’t give up, and she has ALWAYS been with ‘Trump.’”
Not anymore. Now, with all the crude comportment he can conjure up, he calls her a traitor.
Six days after he smeared her, she announced her departure from Congress.
In an interview last month, Greene came clean with what she thinks which, after her unflinching fidelity to Trump, had to be hard to say: “Our side has been trained by Donald Trump to never apologize and to never admit when you’re wrong. You just keep pummeling your enemies, no matter what.” She has come a long way from trumpeting that “Trump Was Right About Everything.”Leave a comment
I don’t want to lionize Marjorie Taylor Greene or Thomas Massie. Each, in his or her way, has been a destructive force in American politics. But I do appreciate that they’ve had the courage to come to their senses, at least with their honesty about the behavior of this president. They too had to know that it would come with a price. They have been willing to pay it.
When John F. Kennedy wrote his book Profiles in Courage, he wrote about moral courage. He wrote about putting principle over politics. In my book, while Greene and Massie are not on the praiseworthy level of Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, all four of these political figures qualify as examples of profiles in courage.