The Cost of Loyalty: What Greene’s Exit Reveals About Women and Power

Across parties and ideologies, women are expendable—unless we build a political home grounded in radical feminist truth.

Marjorie Taylor Greene’s resignation landed like a small earthquake in Georgia politics, but the tremors reach much farther than her district lines. Whatever anyone thinks of her — and the reactions tend to be extreme — this moment is about something bigger than a single woman, a single office, or a single political feud. It is about what happens to women when male power decides it’s done with them.

Because a woman being targeted by the most powerful man in the world is never something to shrug off. And the fact that she once supported him doesn’t make the danger any less real.

When Greene posted that she was “now being contacted by private security firms” warning of heightened threats as Trump escalated his rhetoric against her, she wasn’t exaggerating. This is a woman who has already been repeatedly swatted, multiple times, at her home, with her family present. Swatting is not a prank. A woman has already died as a result of one of the many swattings at Greene’s residence. And when she says, “As a woman I take threats from men seriously,” she isn’t being dramatic — she’s acknowledging a material reality every woman instinctively understands. Male aggression carries consequences. Male rage has a body count.

Trump’s public attacks didn’t emerge in a vacuum. They poured gasoline on a fire already burning — a fire fueled by online men who view political women as fair game. When a man with Trump’s power points his followers toward a woman he’s angry with, the threat to her family isn’t theoretical. It spikes immediately. You don’t have to share Greene’s politics to recognize the pattern. You only need to be a woman who has ever been punished for stepping out of line.

This is the cost of a political system built around male dominance. Women may do the work, carry the water, and defend the men at the top, but the protection we’re promised is always conditional. The minute a woman stops being useful, the approval vanishes — and often, so does her safety.

Greene’s resignation statement makes this dynamic painfully visible. She spelled out the sacrifices she made — the travel, the endless campaigning, the missed time with her family, even leaving her father’s bedside during brain surgery to defend Trump during impeachment. She emphasized how consistently she voted with him, how rarely she disagreed, how loyal she remained. And then she described the moment all that loyalty stopped mattering.

What ended their alliance wasn’t ideology. It wasn’t “principles.” It was disagreement over the Epstein files and over healthcare — issues that directly shape women’s material lives, not men’s political egos. The moment she pressed back, even slightly, her entire political world collapsed. Trump called her a traitor. His followers flooded her with hostility. And the same male-driven movement she defended for years suddenly framed her as disposable.

Her line — “I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better” — is one of the clearest moments of self-awareness we’ve seen from her. Whether she intended it or not, she named the dynamic perfectly.

And this is where the lesson extends far beyond Greene. Women cannot afford blind loyalty to any party or politician. Neither party centers women. Neither party protects us. Neither party treats us as full political actors whose safety matters on its own terms. Women pay the price either way.

On the left, women are punished for saying that sex is real. On the right, women are punished for refusing to submit to male authority. The costumes change, but the structure doesn’t. The expectation is always that women should fall in line, shoulder the work, absorb the blame, and stay quiet when men turn the knives.

Greene’s experience is not unique. It is simply louder, higher-profile, and wrapped in the chaos of Trumpism — but the underlying dynamic is the same dynamic women face in every political space governed by male power. When women’s loyalty is expected but never reciprocated, that is patriarchy, not partnership. When a woman’s political survival depends on a man’s approval, she is merely an accessory.

And this brings us full circle to what I wrote last November in Beyond the Ballot: How Radical Feminism Can Lead the Fight for Women’s Rights. I argued then that women cannot rely on institutions captured by ideology or on parties captured by men. This moment proves that point even more sharply. Women need a political home that isn’t compromised or conditional — a home that doesn’t treat our safety as collateral damage in male power struggles, a home that begins with the truth of our lived reality and refuses to sacrifice women’s welfare for anyone’s agenda.

Radical feminism remains the only framework that tells the truth about male power, the only movement that understands women’s safety as non-negotiable, and the only political lens that doesn’t require women to silence ourselves to be tolerated. It recognizes that male violence is not an abstraction. It understands that the forces hurting women today — from captured institutions to male-led movements demanding obedience — are the same forces that have always controlled us. And it offers women something neither party is capable of giving: a point of unity rooted in our shared material reality as a sex class.

The lesson here is not whether Greene deserves sympathy or scorn. The lesson is what it means, in 2025, for any woman to be targeted by a man with an enormous platform and an audience primed for rage. It is what women across the political spectrum must finally accept: no man, no party, and no political machine will ever prioritize our safety the way we must. We cannot outsource our protection to institutions built by and for men. We cannot wait for them to remember we exist.

Women must remain independent, vigilant, and grounded in truth. And we must begin building political homes that actually protect us — homes shaped by women, led by women, and accountable to women.

Greene’s resignation is not just a political story. It is a warning. And if we’re paying attention, it is also an invitation to build something better — something rooted in women’s material reality, something stronger than male power, and something capable of uniting women across party lines for our own survival.

It is time for women to stop asking who will protect us and start asking what we can build that protects each other. Radical feminism gives us the blueprint — and moments like this remind us why we need it.