The Devil We Got Used To: Normalcy Bias, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the Art of the Fake Redemption Arc

How America learned to confuse survival with progress—and why Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “redemption” says more about our psychology than hers.

Every one of us wakes up most mornings expecting the day to behave itself, like a dog that has never once bitten anyone and therefore we assume never will. That expectation has a name. Psychologists call it normalcy bias, and it is the quiet, stupid, completely unearned assumption that whatever happened yesterday is probably going to happen again today. Normalcy bias does not require your life to be good. It only requires your life to be boring in a way you can predict. If you are the kind of person who orders a Filet-O-Fish every single Friday like it is a religious sacrament, normalcy bias is what makes you assume McDonald’s will have fish on a random Friday afternoon, and when some regional supply chain hiccup leaves you standing at the counter being told they are out, you will feel a rage completely disproportionate to the price of the sandwich. That is not about the fish. That is about the universe breaking a promise it never actually made you.

Here is the part people miss: normalcy does not mean good. It just means normal. A person can be in a genuinely miserable situation and still develop a normalcy bias around the misery, because even suffering has a rhythm you can set your watch to, the same way you can get used to a smoke detector chirping every night at 3 a.m. and eventually just sleep through the apocalypse. Say you are in your twenties, dating someone you argue with so constantly that neither of you actually likes the other anymore, but the arguing has become the metronome of the relationship, the background hum of the whole operation. You expect to fight. You expect to make up. You expect Tuesday to look like every other miserable Tuesday. Then one day, seemingly out of nowhere, she dumps you. It was not out of nowhere. There were a hundred signs, all of them screaming, all of them ignored, because the daily dysfunction had become so routine that the actual ending felt like getting hit by a bus you swore only existed in other people’s neighborhoods. Psychologists call that specific gut-punch an expectancy violation, the moment reality snaps a pattern you had unconsciously bet your whole nervous system on continuing. For a lot of people that snap is genuinely traumatic, whether what came before was good, bad, or just a low simmering disaster you had learned to call home.

Politics runs on this exact mechanism, except it runs on it constantly, at national scale, with worse hair and significantly more lying. A country settles into a normal. Something detonates that normal. The country picks through the rubble and calls the wreckage a new normal. Then something detonates that one too. Rinse, repeat, forever, like a horror movie franchise that keeps getting sequels nobody asked for because the first one made money. It is not a bug in how democracies process shocks, it is closer to the operating system. The real question is not whether the cycle keeps spinning, because it absolutely will, it is what quietly gets shoved into the category of “fine, whatever” every time the wheel turns, and whether anybody has the stomach to admit what just got swallowed.

And here is the sneaky part: the cycle never announces itself while it is happening. Nobody gets a push notification saying, hey, the baseline just moved, please adjust your outrage settings accordingly. The new normal just kind of oozes in overnight, like mold, and within a year or two the thing that would have ended a career under the old normal barely rates a shrug and a scroll past in the new one. That is how genuinely deranged behavior gets laundered into background noise, and it works best precisely when nobody bothers to point at it and go, hey, wait a second.

From 1789 to 2016, the American presidency operated inside guardrails that both parties, whatever else they were lying about, mostly agreed to respect. Plenty of corruption in there. Plenty of cruelty, incompetence, scandal, the occasional flash of real heroism, the whole ugly buffet of human government. But underneath all of it sat one non-negotiable rule: you run, you win or you lose, and if you lose, you accept it like an adult and get out of the building. Forty-four transitions of power happened this way, through wars, depressions, and assassinations, and the losing side always eventually took the L and went home. Then, on June 16, 2015, Donald Trump rode down a golden escalator like a Bond villain who forgot to buy a volcano lair, announced he was running for president, and the rules that had held for two hundred twenty-six years started disintegrating in real time, because it turns out normalcy bias does not check your IQ, your resume, or how many books you have written before it grabs you by the throat.

Marc Lamont Hill, a genuinely sharp cultural commentator, went on The Breakfast Club in August of 2016 and told Charlamagne, DJ Envy, and Angela Yee, “I’m not scared of Trump. I’m scared of us as a country moving in the wrong direction.” He went further, saying he would rather have four years of Trump and a genuine left-wing movement born out of the wreckage than four more years of a mid Democrat lulling everyone back to sleep. Eddie Glaude Jr., who runs African American Studies at Princeton and has built an entire career studying exactly this kind of political behavior, was even more honest about the whiff. In October of 2018 he sat on MSNBC and said, flatly, no cushioning, “What I did wrong in 2016 is I overestimated white people. I didn’t think white people would put him in office.” Sit with that. These are not dumb men. These are two of the sharpest voices in Black political commentary, and normalcy bias mugged both of them in broad daylight anyway, because normalcy bias does not care about your CV, your tenure, or your podcast numbers.

Now I hear this constantly, from students, from readers, from strangers on the internet who found my Substack because somebody shared a piece about the Supreme Court: Trump is the worst president in American history. I get the impulse. I really do. But “worst president of my lifetime” and “worst president ever” are two very different bar exams, and blurring them together is a walking, talking example of recency bias, the very human habit of grading the thing in front of your face on a curve so steep it makes everything before it look like a warmup act. Trump is unambiguously the worst president of my lifetime. I will die on that hill wearing that as a T-shirt. But “ever” is a two-hundred-and-fifty-year pageant, and America has produced contestants for that crown who made genocide, treason, and Klan movie nights their whole personality, decades before anyone had heard the phrase covfefe.

Start with Andrew Jackson, a man so committed to Native genocide that when the Supreme Court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that Georgia had zero authority over Cherokee land, Jackson simply ignored it, reportedly announcing that John Marshall had made his decision and could go enforce it his damn self. He did not even need the quote to be real for the outcome to be identical: Georgia kept doing whatever it wanted, and by 1838 the U.S. Army was marching thousands of Cherokee men, women, and children off their own land at gunpoint in what we now call the Trail of Tears, a death march that killed thousands through exposure, starvation, and disease. That is not a scandal. That is not even a norm violation. That is a sitting president shrugging off a coequal branch of government and then finishing the genocide anyway, like a man skipping a stop sign because the intersection was empty.

Then there is Andrew Johnson, who inherited the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination and used it to torch the entire project of Black freedom the Civil War had just been fought and won to secure. Johnson pardoned more than thirteen thousand former Confederates like party favors, handed the plantation class its political power back before the ink was dry, and then vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, forcing Congress to override him just to guarantee formerly enslaved people basic legal equality. He fought the Fourteenth Amendment. He fought Reconstruction with both fists. The predictable result was Southern legislatures, restocked with the same men who had just lost a war to keep slavery alive, passing Black Codes that recreated bondage under a friendlier font. Johnson did not merely fail to protect Black Americans. He actively engineered Reconstruction’s collapse, which is about as direct a betrayal of the job description as a presidency can commit.

Woodrow Wilson gets his own personal circle of hell for this. Wilson took office in 1913 and resegregated a federal government that had been racially integrated since Reconstruction, ripping out four decades of Black civil servants from jobs they had earned, installing literal partition screens between Black and white workers like it was a middle school cafeteria, and blocking Black federal employees from promotion. Two years later he became the first president to screen a movie inside the White House, and the movie he picked was Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s three-hour recruitment ad for the Ku Klux Klan, which Wilson reportedly praised as being like writing history with lightning, adding that his only regret was that it was all so terribly true. A sitting American president hosted a private Klan movie night in the actual White House and then said the quiet part out loud like he was reviewing it for Rotten Tomatoes.

And finally, James Buchanan, the guy historians reach for whenever they need a punching bag for pure, weapons-grade passivity. Buchanan watched seven states secede in the lame-duck months before Lincoln’s inauguration and essentially shrugged, deciding that while secession was not technically legal, the federal government also did not have the power to stop it, which is an incredible position for the literal sitting president of the United States to hold while the United States was in the process of ceasing to be united. He did nothing while Confederate sympathizers in his own cabinet quietly shipped weapons south. He did nothing while state after state walked out the door like guests leaving a party early. Historians have ranked him dead last in poll after poll since at least 1948, and every attempt to rehabilitate his legacy reads like someone trying to get a participation trophy engraved for a guy who watched the house burn down because confrontation felt rude.

So here is the honest ledger. Trump is not more diabolical than Jackson’s genocide, Johnson’s sabotage of Black freedom, Wilson’s white-supremacist encore, or Buchanan’s catastrophic paralysis while the Union came apart in his hands. Where Trump actually, uncontestedly wins gold is childishness, specifically the childishness of being the first person in American history to blow through the one norm every single one of his forty-four predecessors respected without exception: you lose, you accept it, you go home like a grown man. Forty-four elections came and went across two hundred and thirty-one years without a single losing candidate trying to overturn the result by force. And yes, I said forty-four elections fully aware that some wise guy in my comments is about to type “well actually Grover Cleveland,” so let the record show I already did that math on purpose, because I know my audience and at least three of you had your fingers hovering over the reply button. Two hundred thirty-one years is a long stretch to go without an attempted coup, but forty-four elections, sat with honestly, is not exactly a lottery-sized sample either. If you believe in the law of averages even a little, I guess we were due one eventually. That does not make it less disgraceful. It just makes it slightly less shocking in hindsight than it felt in real time, which, again, is normalcy bias doing exactly what normalcy bias does.

I have often called Barack Obama the Batman of American presidents, and before anyone pictures Obama in a cape and cowl brooding on a rooftop, let me explain the bit. There is a decades-old argument among comic book nerds about whether Batman created Gotham’s parade of costumed lunatics, or whether Gotham was always going to produce those lunatics and Batman just happened to be the response. I will be grateful for Obama’s presidency until the day I die. But there is a real case that his arrival, a Black man from a working-class background winning the White House twice, provoked a reactionary strain in this country to finally stop whispering and start shouting, on a timeline it might not have otherwise kept. Whatever the exact cause and effect, Obama’s presidency was followed almost immediately by Trump’s, and Trump, in this framing, is the Joker: not a policy platform so much as a delivery system for chaos, whose entire governing philosophy begins and ends with loyalty to himself. Trump’s cult of personality did not just win an election. It permanently rewired what counts as a good Republican, because the entry fee stopped being a shared platform and became devotion to one man. And once devotion becomes the cover charge, you should expect the club to start filling up with people who were always more interested in devotion than ideas. One of the people that cover charge let through the door is Marjorie Taylor Greene.

MTG was not some opportunist who found Fox News religion and rode the wave into a House seat. She was a true believer, a documented conspiracy theorist who agreed with Facebook comments calling Parkland and Sandy Hook staged “false flag” events, and a habitual instigator who spent years being, by any honest measure, a genuinely trash human being in public life. She was also, for a good long stretch, one of Trump’s most loyal foot soldiers in Congress, which is exactly what makes her story worth telling here, because her own personal normalcy bias about Trump’s loyalty finally got the expectancy violation treatment when he went silent, then hostile, on the Epstein files.

I wrote about the start of that unraveling when it first became undeniable, in a piece about her finally hitting the fuck-around-and-find-out stage of the relationship, and the details that have surfaced since only sharpen the joke. Greene has described a phone call from Trump while she was standing in the Rayburn building, in which he pressured her to remove her name from a discharge petition demanding release of the Epstein files, reportedly warning her that his friends in Palm Beach would get hurt if the files came out, which is a genuinely wild sentence for a sitting president to say out loud to a sitting congresswoman. She refused, called Epstein exactly what he was, a rapist and a pedophile whose victims deserved transparency, and asked Trump to host those victims in the Oval Office, a request he declined. According to Greene, after she reported death threats against her own son to Trump, he told her it was her own fault, that she deserved it for going against him, which is the kind of thing you say if you learned parenting and leadership from the same guy who taught you negotiation. Only four House Republicans had the spine to sign the original discharge petition: Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Lauren Boebert, and Greene herself. Everyone else in the conference waited for the political weather to change before climbing aboard, which is its own tidy case study in the first track of normalization I want to walk through: institutional cowardice as the default factory setting. Nobody in that conference woke up with new moral information about Jeffrey Epstein. They woke up with new information about which way the wind was blowing, and signed the second it became free to do so. That is not courage. That is a weather vane with a voting card.

Because here is what Trump’s entire run has actually accomplished, independent of any single policy win, and it operates on two tracks at once. Track one: a genuinely staggering amount of behavior that would have ended a career a decade ago is now just furniture in the room, the political equivalent of a couch nobody remembers buying. DEI, a set of employment practices basically nobody outside HR could define with precision five years ago, is now treated as a legitimate national debate rather than what it mostly is, which is anti-discrimination policy with a branding problem. “Woke” has been fully weaponized as an insult, to the point where even Democrats reach for it to insult each other. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan built an entire strategy rollout around telling her own party to shed its “weak and woke” reputation, which tells you the word has been so thoroughly recoded that even the people it was coined to flatter now swing it like a bat at their own team. Media outlets that spent years cosplaying as adversarial to Trump now casually cut access deals and shrug off things that used to be actual constitutional violations, like a president profiting off foreign government business while in office, a plain, textbook emoluments problem that barely trends anymore. None of that is normal. All of it has been laundered into normal, one shrug at a time.

Track two is the sneakier half, and honestly the more corrosive one, because it feels generous instead of rotten: the reflexive stampede to rehabilitate anyone who shows the faintest hairline crack in their MAGA loyalty, whether or not actual atonement ever shows up to accompany it. I am fully in favor of forgiveness when someone genuinely reckons with what they did. That is not what is happening here. Tucker Carlson will apologize, very specifically, for supporting Trump, while continuing to run the exact same racially coded material that got him bounced from Fox in the first place, which is not atonement, that is a rebrand with better lighting. The podcast bros who spent years laundering Trump to twenty-two-year-old men remain, to a one, exactly as full of shit as they have always been, just with softer marketing now that the winds shifted. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, whose feelings genuinely did get hurt when Trump would not release the full Epstein files, is still the same person she has always been. Going on The View or TYT or MS NOW does not launder that. A hurt feeling is not a moral awakening, and I promise you Oprah is not going to hand her a car for finally noticing the guy she pledged her soul to is a liar.

I watched the full Chris Cuomo interview with Greene, the one titled “What Trump Told Marjorie Taylor Greene About Epstein,” and honestly, the Epstein material was not what stuck with me. What stuck with me was the fight she got into with Cuomo early on, because it was not just unhinged, it was checkable, Google-it-yourself, five-minutes-of-your-life false. Cuomo pushed her on why he had originally written her off as dangerous, telling her flatly she had been presented to him as a QAnon conspiracist who was “with Alex Jones on Sandy Hook,” and asked what he had gotten wrong. Greene rejected the premise entirely. “That’s completely wrong about Sandy Hook,” she said. “I would never call any school shooting, say that it was not real. It absolutely was real. That’s horrific.” When Cuomo followed up asking if she thought Parkland was a false flag, she said no, insisted she was “on record over and over” saying so, then warned him she would not be “put on trial” for things she never said. When he kept pressing, she threatened to end the interview outright, telling him she could dig up plenty of dirt on him too if he wanted to play that game, and that if he wanted a real conversation about current events instead of relitigating her past, fine, otherwise she was walking. At one point she told him, “I don’t believe you, because I walk around in my own skin every fucking day and I have not had to have this type of energy,” which is a sentence that means absolutely nothing and yet somehow landed like a mic drop in the room. Cuomo, credit where it is due for keeping the interview alive and zero credit anywhere else, folded like a lawn chair and pivoted straight to Epstein.

Here is the problem: what Greene said on camera is not spin, it is a documented, provable lie about her own paper trail, the kind of lie you could disprove during a commercial break. Reporting going back to 2021 shows Greene agreeing with a Facebook comment in 2018 that called Parkland a “false flag planned shooting,” and separately responding “that’s all true” to a post claiming Sandy Hook was staged. This is not some dusty gotcha buried in a forgotten archive. It was reported everywhere, it triggered a formal House vote on whether to strip her committee assignments over it, and grieving Sandy Hook and Parkland families publicly condemned her at the time. So when she told Chris Cuomo, on camera, in the year 2026, that she never said any of that, she was not misremembering. She was rewriting her own public record in real time, live, on television, betting the room would not do the two minutes of homework required to catch her. And here is where it loops back to everything else in this piece: Cuomo let her. He did not say, hey, you do realize Google is a thing, right? He did not pull up the archived comment on his phone like literally anyone with a Twitter account could have. He just moved the segment along, and in doing so did precisely what mainstream media now does on reflex across the board, which is let a demonstrably false claim sit there uncontested because pushing back on it is apparently more friction than the format can afford anymore. That is track one, the normalization of the fuckery itself, caught happening live, on camera, during an interview that was supposedly about accountability.

So here is where I land, and I want to be precise, because precision is the whole point of this exercise. If you want to give Marjorie Taylor Greene some credit for finally taking the blinders off about Donald Trump, fine, I will not stop you, and I will even grant that her break with him over Epstein cost her something real: a primary threat, an endorsement, eventually her own seat in Congress. That is not nothing. But any psychologist worth their license will tell you real atonement requires honesty about what you actually did, not a camera-ready edit of your own history designed to make the current version of you look cleaner than the receipts allow. Without that honesty, there is no becoming a better person. There is only becoming a better-positioned one, which is a very different thing wearing the same outfit. And the rush from outlets like Chris Cuomo’s show, TYT, and plenty of others to paint Greene as some kind of redemption arc, a woman who saw the light, is beyond pathetic, because it skips the one step that would make it true. She did not become a better person. She became a person the media currently finds useful to book, and mistaking one for the other is exactly the kind of comfortable lie a tired country tells itself in between disasters.

That is the trap of the whole cycle, and it is worth saying plainly on the way out. Normalcy bias does not just make you miss the shock coming. It makes you desperate to believe the aftermath has settled into something stable and good, because stability itself feels like relief after enough chaos, whether or not the thing stabilizing has earned an ounce of your trust. A country exhausted by years of Trump-shaped chaos is going to grab onto anyone who looks like they are stepping away from him and call it progress, because progress is exactly what an exhausted electorate wants to believe is finally happening. But relief is not reform, and a famous woman distancing herself from the man who betrayed her is not the same thing as that same woman reckoning honestly, out loud, with the years she spent making other people’s lives worse before he ever did it to her. Until she does that math in public with the same directness she used to threaten Chris Cuomo’s whole interview, the redemption arc stays exactly what it has been from the jump: a story other people are telling about her, for their own reasons, that she has not actually gone out and earned.