Story by Kara Voght
Today at 5:00 a.m. EST
The day before Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she was quitting Congress, her boyfriend was outside the White House. This wasn’t an unusual place to find Brian Glenn. He’s the White House correspondent for Real America’s Voice, a pro-Trump broadcast network, and films his live shots by the row of media tents along the residence’s North Lawn.
What was unusual was that Glenn wasn’t closer to the action. He hadn’t ventured into the Oval Office that week, nor attended that day’s press briefing. And he hadn’t sought any face time with President Donald Trump.
“I didn’t want to make any awkward spaces,” Glenn told me, “so I said, ‘You know what? Let me just stay back this week.’”
Glenn works at, not for the White House, though you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise. Among the friendly media figures Trump has welcomed into the press corps, Glenn is among the most obliging. “I’m so much more based than they are,” Glenn boasts during one of our interviews, referring to his peers in the pro-MAGA media. “And the administration knows that, too.” He has been rewarded with top-notch access to the president; whenever Trump offers himself to the press, it’s been a safe bet that Glenn is in the room.
Glenn’s social media feeds, meanwhile, are replete with reposts of White House talking points, as well as his own commentary about the fantastic work Trump is doing. On the lethal missile attacks on alleged drug boats that have prompted scrutiny from Congress: “Trump is defeating the drug cartels. One strike at a time.” On the subject of Jeffrey Epstein: “TRUMP DID NOTHING WRONG … FACT.” On economic anxiety at home: “President Trump has done a tremendous job lowering the cost of goods and services. That is FACT.”
In recent weeks, however, Trump had taken a position that Glenn could not endorse.
“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” the president posted on Truth Social last month.
Greene had lately opposed Trump on several issues she argued were important to his voters, such as releasing the Epstein files and extending health care subsidies that passed under President Joe Biden. Trump had retaliated by pulling his endorsement of the Georgia congresswoman, effectively inviting a more obsequious Republican challenger to take her out next year. He’d also given her a nickname: “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene” — or the less homophonic “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown,” because “Green turns to Brown where there is ROT involved!”
So Glenn was lying low. It wasn’t that he felt the whole White House had turned against him; press secretary Karoline Leavitt and communications director Steven Cheung had both sent him kind notes. But he didn’t want his fellow reporters to feel uncomfortable asking Trump about the falling-out with Greene. And he didn’t want to have to stand there and listen to Trump’s response — especially since Trump’s responses, thus far, had struck Glenn as unfair.
“Like, what are you talking about, man? She’s one of your biggest supporters,” he told me that day. It was a tougher line of questioning than I’d ever seen him pose to the president. “She differs on a couple of issues, but she’s still in your camp,” he continued. “She never left your camp!”
The explosive breakup between Trump and Greene has captivated political spectators, raising questions about the relationship between the president and the MAGA base. How reciprocal is their loyalty? How conditional is their love? And what does it mean for certain differences to become irreconcilable?
For the analysts, the implications are political — what these strains and schisms could mean for the midterms, the next presidential election, the future of the Republican Party. For Glenn, they’re personal.
“He’s in a tough spot,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), a friend of the couple, told me in November.
Earlier this year, Glenn and Greene looked like a power couple uniquely suited to thrive in Trump’s Washington. Now, she’s leaving town. So where does that leave Glenn?
“I’m like the little divorced kid in the middle!” he told me after Greene announced her resignation.
And he really, really doesn’t want to have to choose sides.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend has had a weird month© Haiyun Jiang/FTWP
Hiiiii, my favorite customer!” a barista cooed as Glenn walked into a Starbucks around the corner from the White House.
The feeling was mutual. “I swear,” Glenn joked to me later, “if they ever try to close that Starbucks location, I will make January 6th look like child’s play.”
The 56-year-old Texan looked camera-ready in a blazer, slim-fit khakis and white-soled leather sneakers. His sandy-colored hair, gray at the temples, was spiked skyward, and his skin was tan. Glenn got his start in local news, at an ABC affiliate in Dallas, and in drive-time talk radio. He lost his last job in mainstream media, at broadcast conglomerate Nexstar, in 2020, for posting photographs from a Trump rally and criticizing covid-19 lockdowns on social media. He found a new home at Right Side Broadcasting Network, best known for live-streaming Trump rallies without editing or critical commentary.
Greene, 51, called him as we waited to order chai tea lattes, wanting to know when he’d come by the Capitol to meet up with her. Up until that point, Glenn had been speaking in Newsman Voice, an animated baritone with a hint of twang. He spoke to the congresswoman in Boyfriend Voice, a singsong whisper.
“People don’t see the side of Marjorie that I do,” Glenn told me after the call. “When you take her out of politics, she’s sweet. She’s sweet!”
He first spotted her at a Trump rally in 2022: a small, striking blonde striding past the media riser. “She was, like, mystical — like a unicorn or something like that, you know?” he said. They met at an event later that year and began publicly dating in early 2023, soon after both had initiated divorce proceedings for their long first marriages.
The first thing he loved about her was her voice, a Georgian drawl that struck him as equal parts “sweet and sincere.” He loved her “beautiful” blue eyes and her “very gentle, almost angelic soul.” As they got to know each other, he learned they both loved shooting guns and working out. He felt a thrill to discover they had the same Gen X rock bands on their respective playlists: Nickelback, Papa Roach, Shinedown, Bush.
One passion, however, united them above all others.
“We both, 100 percent, were like, ‘This is the guy,’” Glenn says of Trump, then a disgraced ex-president trying to claw his way back to Washington. The once and future president’s cause became their bond. “It was like, ‘You’re doing what you do in Congress,” he says. “And I’m doing what I’m doing in the media.’”
What was Greene doing in Congress? A lot of people had that question back in 2021. During her campaign, Republican leaders had denounced comments she made about Muslims and others as “appalling,” “bigoted” and “disgusting.” After she won, her new House colleagues — including 11 Republicans — voted to remove her from committees over her past enthusiasm for conspiracy theories. Ben Sasse, then a Republican senator from Nebraska, called her “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
When Glenn was in Washington, he would hang out in Greene’s congressional office and play the role of “emotional support human,” escorting her to the Capitol for votes.
“I feel sorry for her because she went through some very difficult times by herself in Congress,” he told me. “All of the crazy stories about the space lasers and all that stuff — when that really came down on her, she was all by herself.”
Greene, by the way, did not respond to my many interview requests. (“I think Brian’s more excited about this story than she is,” Ty Sharpe, Greene’s deputy chief of staff, told me when I ran into him by the House chamber one night.) She did, however, eventually give me a statement — conveyed via a text from Glenn.
“Brian is my best friend, loyal, fun, and by my side no matter what,” the congresswoman said, according to her boyfriend. “I love him dearly and want every adventure to be with him.”
During Trump’s comeback campaign, Greene would sometimes meet Glenn on the road, joining him on camera for pre-rally color commentary. When Trump went on trial in New York, in April 2023, they attended the court proceedings together, him doing live shots and her hosting a rally.
Naturally, Glenn interviewed her about the travails of the man they loved.
Naturally, Greene compared Trump’s legal woes to the persecution of Nelson Mandela and Jesus.
Naturally, the newsman ended the interview with a kiss on the congresswoman’s cheek. (Right Side Broadcasting Network reportedly stopped letting him interview her after that.)
Greene and Glenn share a kiss at a 2024 Trump rally in State College, Pennsylvania.© Jeff Swensen/Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post
Glenn and Greene share an apartment in the District. They go out for the occasional date night to the Mexican restaurant Mi Vida on the Wharf, an upscale development on D.C.'s Southwest Waterfront. Other than that, they haven’t explored much. “It’s a demonic town,” Glenn told me.
He became quite comfortable, however, in the White House, where he quickly distinguished himself among the correspondents.
When Trump returned to Washington, the name of the game was loyalty: to him, his rules and his vision for how all this should work. That extended to the Washington press corps. The White House has asserted tighter control over which news outlets have access to the president, punishing those whose coverage or stylistic conventions contradict the president’s preferences. It has launched a website dedicated to shaming members of media for, among other transgressions, “bias,” “malpractice” and “left-wing lunacy.” Trump, meanwhile, has taken to responding to questions he doesn’t like with insults about the reporters (“Quiet, piggy”) and their news outlets.
None of this has posed a problem for Glenn. “Am I going to try to trip him up with some kind of word salad and get him to say something stupid? I’m not,” he says of his approach. He seems to prefer playing the Ed McMahon to Trump’s Johnny Carson — less a neutral adversary than a scene partner.
“You’re building the big, beautiful ballroom,” Glenn asked at an August news conference. “Could we build a big, beautiful briefing room?”
“I don’t want to do that,” Trump replied, with a grin. “I don’t want you to be comfortable.”
“Ireland is known for very happy, fun-loving people,” Glenn remarked to Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in March, during a joint Oval Office news conference with Trump. Then he asked the taoiseach: “Why in the world would you let Rosie O’Donnell move to Ireland? I think she’s going to lower your happiness level.”
“That’s true,” Trump cut in. “Thank you. I like that question.”
During a September Oval Office presser, Glenn pulled out his phone to show Trump a photograph he’d taken of a Progress Pride flag hanging from a lamppost on a street near the White House. “This flag right here is up and down 14th Street,” he said. “This is what would be the trans flag. A lot of people are very threatened by this flag. It means a lot of different negative things to people — violence. Would you be opposed to taking down this flag up and down the streets of D.C.?” This yielded an odd moment in which the president had to remind the reporter about the First Amendment: Trump assured Glenn that he personally would have “no problem” with taking the flags down, “But then they’ll sue and they’ll get freedom of speech.”
Stephen K. Bannon, the host of “War Room,” which also airs on Real America’s Voice, says Glenn is “a rock star.”
“I call him ‘the Helen Thomas of the current White House,’” Bannon told me. Which is an interesting comparison, given that Thomas, a stalwart of the Washington press corps for about half a century, was known for her “blunt questions and sharp tone,” per her New York Times obituary. When Glenn has deployed blunt questions and a sharp tone, it’s directed at people other than Trump.
Remember, back in February, when a White House reporter pointedly asked Volodymyr Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit in the Oval Office? Guess who.
The Ukraine president’s attire, Glenn told me, was something he and Greene had discussed together. “We’d talked about how he’d walk around the halls of Congress, asking for money in his little green jumpsuit,” he said. “So we were like, ‘Is he going to show up in that, or is he going to wear a suit?’” (After the meeting, Greene wrote on X that she was “so proud” of Glenn “for pointing out that Zelensky has so much disrespect for America that he can’t even wear a suit in the Oval Office when he comes to beg for money from our President.”)
That Glenn was dating one of Trump’s most ardent allies on the Hill was treated as a fun fact. In July, Trump teased Glenn for pitching him on eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales — something Greene had proposed in Congress.
Trump replied that he was already considering such a move, then added, with a smirk: “I’m very impressed that you asked that question because nobody knew that. How did you find that out?”
“I wonder why,” Glenn responded. “There’s someone I’m very close to —”
“There’s a leaker, there’s a leaker,” Trump interjected.
That same month, aboard Air Force One en route to an immigration detention center in Florida, the president introduced Glenn to Gov. Ron DeSantis as “the boyfriend, very lucky, of Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
“Do you think it’s easy, being with Marjorie?” Trump asked DeSantis.
“I’m not going to answer that … kidding!!” Glenn later posted on X. Greene, he wrote, “is a joy to be with and I love her with all my heart.”
For Trump, the answer would end up being more complicated.
Greene stands with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) on Jan. 6, 2022. The pair did a live stream interview with Glenn that day, on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.© Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post
While Glenn had been cheerleading the president from the press pool, Greene had been showing an independent streak.
She’d been delicate about it, at first.
“To be clear, I love President Trump and everything he has done and is trying to do for this country,” she wrote on X in May, explaining her decision not to run for Senate by sounding off on Republican elites (including “political consultants embedded in the White House”).
In July, when Trump rankled the MAGA base by bombing Iranian nuclear sites, Greene criticized the move while making clear that she was not criticizing the president. “That’s not disloyalty,” she explained. “Critical thinking and having my own opinions is the most American thing ever.”
When she flamed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and other Republicans over the government shutdown, she took pains to praise her commander in chief: “Whereas President Trump has a very strong, dominant style — he’s not weak at all — a lot of the men here in the House are weak.”
Nevertheless, Greene was staking out positions that ran counter to the president’s; besides the Epstein files and extending health care subsidies, Greene also called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” She started swapping “MAGA” for “America First, America Only,” a slogan for a more extreme American isolationism and a hyperfocus on domestic issues. In November, after Republicans got beat badly in a series of off-year elections, she started talking about how the cost of living was still a problem — cutting against Trump’s narrative of an American “golden age.”
“I will give the president some credit that inflation has been holding around 2.5 percent, but people in my district are really struggling,” Greene told NBC then. “Rent and home prices continue to go up. The price of food continues to go up.”
A few days later, in the Oval Office, a reporter for CNN asked the president about Greene’s comments.
“I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” Trump replied. “She’s a nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”
Glenn wasn’t at the White House that day. He’d traveled home to Texas to care for his mother, who was having back surgery. He remembers getting texts while at a Walgreens drive-through asking him about what the president had said about his girlfriend.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Glenn told me. “It hurt.”
Then Trump started calling Greene a traitor online. And he revoked his endorsement of her.
That hurt even more.
“I never could have imagined how a nuclear bomb could go off over someone’s head the way it did that Friday,” Glenn said.
That weekend, back in Georgia, Glenn and Greene put up their Christmas tree and watched “Elf.” They went to the gun range, he said, to “blow off some steam.” But the political whirlwind Trump’s ire had kicked up was hard to shut out: There were pipe bomb threats, Glenn says. Hoax pizza deliveries. A deluge of hateful comments.
On Saturday afternoon, Glenn posted four pictures of him and Greene — hiking, smiling on a balcony in Washington, kissing by the beach.
“I love this woman,” he wrote in the caption. “I love this country. God bless America.”
But something had obviously broken. And ironically, it had been the MAGA firebrand, not the White House reporter, who had crossed a line with the president by telling a story that he didn’t like.
Greene speaks with Glenn in her Capitol Hill office in 2024.© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Greene had weighed quitting Congress “maybe a hundred times” since the drama started, Glenn told me. On Nov. 21, he sat with her in their Georgia home as she filmed herself explaining her decision to resign.
In the video, she reiterated that, yes, Americans are having trouble affording their lives. While establishment Republicans “secretly hate” the president, Greene said, she had defended him — including flying back to Washington while her father was having brain surgery to vote against impeaching the president over the Jan. 6 riot.
“Loyalty,” she said, “should be a two-way street.”
Speaking of loyalty — what about the man in the middle? Who would get Glenn in the divorce?
“Well, I gotta go with ‘Mom’ here,” he told me.
Glenn is giving up his White House gig and following her back to Georgia. “I’m not doing this fly-back-and-forth thing — not doing it, it’s not worth it,” he told me. Real America’s Voice is building him a studio near home in Georgia, he says. “I’ll do whatever content from there — either contribute to the network or do something else as well, another show or something.”
I asked Glenn if he plans to marry Greene. “I see that in the future for sure,” he said. But he wanted a future with Trump, too. “I will continue to support the president — I want to make sure that’s in the piece,” he told me. But he wasn’t certain that the feeling was still mutual.
“I haven’t seen him in person yet,” Glenn said. “That first interaction …”
A week later, the White House held an event in the Oval Office with automakers about lowering Biden-era fuel-efficiency standards. Trump digressed into a monologue about how Democrats’ messaging about affordability was a “con job.” When he finally opened the floor to the press, he called on Glenn first.
Glenn was ready to tee up the president: Didn’t an increase in online Black Friday spending counter the whole affordability narrative? But before he could get a word out, Trump had something to tell him.
“We love you, Brian.”
“Oh, I love you too, Mr. President,” Glenn replied.
That was never a question.
Greene and Glenn leave Capitol Hill for the day in 2024.© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
“I didn’t want to make any awkward spaces,” Glenn told me, “so I said, ‘You know what? Let me just stay back this week.’”
Glenn works at, not for the White House, though you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise. Among the friendly media figures Trump has welcomed into the press corps, Glenn is among the most obliging. “I’m so much more based than they are,” Glenn boasts during one of our interviews, referring to his peers in the pro-MAGA media. “And the administration knows that, too.” He has been rewarded with top-notch access to the president; whenever Trump offers himself to the press, it’s been a safe bet that Glenn is in the room.
Glenn’s social media feeds, meanwhile, are replete with reposts of White House talking points, as well as his own commentary about the fantastic work Trump is doing. On the lethal missile attacks on alleged drug boats that have prompted scrutiny from Congress: “Trump is defeating the drug cartels. One strike at a time.” On the subject of Jeffrey Epstein: “TRUMP DID NOTHING WRONG … FACT.” On economic anxiety at home: “President Trump has done a tremendous job lowering the cost of goods and services. That is FACT.”
In recent weeks, however, Trump had taken a position that Glenn could not endorse.
“All I see ‘Wacky’ Marjorie do is COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN, COMPLAIN!” the president posted on Truth Social last month.
Greene had lately opposed Trump on several issues she argued were important to his voters, such as releasing the Epstein files and extending health care subsidies that passed under President Joe Biden. Trump had retaliated by pulling his endorsement of the Georgia congresswoman, effectively inviting a more obsequious Republican challenger to take her out next year. He’d also given her a nickname: “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene” — or the less homophonic “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown,” because “Green turns to Brown where there is ROT involved!”
So Glenn was lying low. It wasn’t that he felt the whole White House had turned against him; press secretary Karoline Leavitt and communications director Steven Cheung had both sent him kind notes. But he didn’t want his fellow reporters to feel uncomfortable asking Trump about the falling-out with Greene. And he didn’t want to have to stand there and listen to Trump’s response — especially since Trump’s responses, thus far, had struck Glenn as unfair.
“Like, what are you talking about, man? She’s one of your biggest supporters,” he told me that day. It was a tougher line of questioning than I’d ever seen him pose to the president. “She differs on a couple of issues, but she’s still in your camp,” he continued. “She never left your camp!”
The explosive breakup between Trump and Greene has captivated political spectators, raising questions about the relationship between the president and the MAGA base. How reciprocal is their loyalty? How conditional is their love? And what does it mean for certain differences to become irreconcilable?
For the analysts, the implications are political — what these strains and schisms could mean for the midterms, the next presidential election, the future of the Republican Party. For Glenn, they’re personal.
“He’s in a tough spot,” Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tennessee), a friend of the couple, told me in November.
Earlier this year, Glenn and Greene looked like a power couple uniquely suited to thrive in Trump’s Washington. Now, she’s leaving town. So where does that leave Glenn?
“I’m like the little divorced kid in the middle!” he told me after Greene announced her resignation.
And he really, really doesn’t want to have to choose sides.
Marjorie Taylor Greene’s boyfriend has had a weird month© Haiyun Jiang/FTWP
Hiiiii, my favorite customer!” a barista cooed as Glenn walked into a Starbucks around the corner from the White House.
The feeling was mutual. “I swear,” Glenn joked to me later, “if they ever try to close that Starbucks location, I will make January 6th look like child’s play.”
The 56-year-old Texan looked camera-ready in a blazer, slim-fit khakis and white-soled leather sneakers. His sandy-colored hair, gray at the temples, was spiked skyward, and his skin was tan. Glenn got his start in local news, at an ABC affiliate in Dallas, and in drive-time talk radio. He lost his last job in mainstream media, at broadcast conglomerate Nexstar, in 2020, for posting photographs from a Trump rally and criticizing covid-19 lockdowns on social media. He found a new home at Right Side Broadcasting Network, best known for live-streaming Trump rallies without editing or critical commentary.
Greene, 51, called him as we waited to order chai tea lattes, wanting to know when he’d come by the Capitol to meet up with her. Up until that point, Glenn had been speaking in Newsman Voice, an animated baritone with a hint of twang. He spoke to the congresswoman in Boyfriend Voice, a singsong whisper.
“People don’t see the side of Marjorie that I do,” Glenn told me after the call. “When you take her out of politics, she’s sweet. She’s sweet!”
He first spotted her at a Trump rally in 2022: a small, striking blonde striding past the media riser. “She was, like, mystical — like a unicorn or something like that, you know?” he said. They met at an event later that year and began publicly dating in early 2023, soon after both had initiated divorce proceedings for their long first marriages.
The first thing he loved about her was her voice, a Georgian drawl that struck him as equal parts “sweet and sincere.” He loved her “beautiful” blue eyes and her “very gentle, almost angelic soul.” As they got to know each other, he learned they both loved shooting guns and working out. He felt a thrill to discover they had the same Gen X rock bands on their respective playlists: Nickelback, Papa Roach, Shinedown, Bush.
One passion, however, united them above all others.
“We both, 100 percent, were like, ‘This is the guy,’” Glenn says of Trump, then a disgraced ex-president trying to claw his way back to Washington. The once and future president’s cause became their bond. “It was like, ‘You’re doing what you do in Congress,” he says. “And I’m doing what I’m doing in the media.’”
What was Greene doing in Congress? A lot of people had that question back in 2021. During her campaign, Republican leaders had denounced comments she made about Muslims and others as “appalling,” “bigoted” and “disgusting.” After she won, her new House colleagues — including 11 Republicans — voted to remove her from committees over her past enthusiasm for conspiracy theories. Ben Sasse, then a Republican senator from Nebraska, called her “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”
When Glenn was in Washington, he would hang out in Greene’s congressional office and play the role of “emotional support human,” escorting her to the Capitol for votes.
“I feel sorry for her because she went through some very difficult times by herself in Congress,” he told me. “All of the crazy stories about the space lasers and all that stuff — when that really came down on her, she was all by herself.”
Greene, by the way, did not respond to my many interview requests. (“I think Brian’s more excited about this story than she is,” Ty Sharpe, Greene’s deputy chief of staff, told me when I ran into him by the House chamber one night.) She did, however, eventually give me a statement — conveyed via a text from Glenn.
“Brian is my best friend, loyal, fun, and by my side no matter what,” the congresswoman said, according to her boyfriend. “I love him dearly and want every adventure to be with him.”
During Trump’s comeback campaign, Greene would sometimes meet Glenn on the road, joining him on camera for pre-rally color commentary. When Trump went on trial in New York, in April 2023, they attended the court proceedings together, him doing live shots and her hosting a rally.
Naturally, Glenn interviewed her about the travails of the man they loved.
Naturally, Greene compared Trump’s legal woes to the persecution of Nelson Mandela and Jesus.
Naturally, the newsman ended the interview with a kiss on the congresswoman’s cheek. (Right Side Broadcasting Network reportedly stopped letting him interview her after that.)
Greene and Glenn share a kiss at a 2024 Trump rally in State College, Pennsylvania.© Jeff Swensen/Jeff Swensen for The Washington Post
Glenn and Greene share an apartment in the District. They go out for the occasional date night to the Mexican restaurant Mi Vida on the Wharf, an upscale development on D.C.'s Southwest Waterfront. Other than that, they haven’t explored much. “It’s a demonic town,” Glenn told me.
He became quite comfortable, however, in the White House, where he quickly distinguished himself among the correspondents.
When Trump returned to Washington, the name of the game was loyalty: to him, his rules and his vision for how all this should work. That extended to the Washington press corps. The White House has asserted tighter control over which news outlets have access to the president, punishing those whose coverage or stylistic conventions contradict the president’s preferences. It has launched a website dedicated to shaming members of media for, among other transgressions, “bias,” “malpractice” and “left-wing lunacy.” Trump, meanwhile, has taken to responding to questions he doesn’t like with insults about the reporters (“Quiet, piggy”) and their news outlets.
None of this has posed a problem for Glenn. “Am I going to try to trip him up with some kind of word salad and get him to say something stupid? I’m not,” he says of his approach. He seems to prefer playing the Ed McMahon to Trump’s Johnny Carson — less a neutral adversary than a scene partner.
“You’re building the big, beautiful ballroom,” Glenn asked at an August news conference. “Could we build a big, beautiful briefing room?”
“I don’t want to do that,” Trump replied, with a grin. “I don’t want you to be comfortable.”
“Ireland is known for very happy, fun-loving people,” Glenn remarked to Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in March, during a joint Oval Office news conference with Trump. Then he asked the taoiseach: “Why in the world would you let Rosie O’Donnell move to Ireland? I think she’s going to lower your happiness level.”
“That’s true,” Trump cut in. “Thank you. I like that question.”
During a September Oval Office presser, Glenn pulled out his phone to show Trump a photograph he’d taken of a Progress Pride flag hanging from a lamppost on a street near the White House. “This flag right here is up and down 14th Street,” he said. “This is what would be the trans flag. A lot of people are very threatened by this flag. It means a lot of different negative things to people — violence. Would you be opposed to taking down this flag up and down the streets of D.C.?” This yielded an odd moment in which the president had to remind the reporter about the First Amendment: Trump assured Glenn that he personally would have “no problem” with taking the flags down, “But then they’ll sue and they’ll get freedom of speech.”
Stephen K. Bannon, the host of “War Room,” which also airs on Real America’s Voice, says Glenn is “a rock star.”
“I call him ‘the Helen Thomas of the current White House,’” Bannon told me. Which is an interesting comparison, given that Thomas, a stalwart of the Washington press corps for about half a century, was known for her “blunt questions and sharp tone,” per her New York Times obituary. When Glenn has deployed blunt questions and a sharp tone, it’s directed at people other than Trump.
Remember, back in February, when a White House reporter pointedly asked Volodymyr Zelensky why he wasn’t wearing a suit in the Oval Office? Guess who.
The Ukraine president’s attire, Glenn told me, was something he and Greene had discussed together. “We’d talked about how he’d walk around the halls of Congress, asking for money in his little green jumpsuit,” he said. “So we were like, ‘Is he going to show up in that, or is he going to wear a suit?’” (After the meeting, Greene wrote on X that she was “so proud” of Glenn “for pointing out that Zelensky has so much disrespect for America that he can’t even wear a suit in the Oval Office when he comes to beg for money from our President.”)
That Glenn was dating one of Trump’s most ardent allies on the Hill was treated as a fun fact. In July, Trump teased Glenn for pitching him on eliminating capital gains taxes on home sales — something Greene had proposed in Congress.
Trump replied that he was already considering such a move, then added, with a smirk: “I’m very impressed that you asked that question because nobody knew that. How did you find that out?”
“I wonder why,” Glenn responded. “There’s someone I’m very close to —”
“There’s a leaker, there’s a leaker,” Trump interjected.
That same month, aboard Air Force One en route to an immigration detention center in Florida, the president introduced Glenn to Gov. Ron DeSantis as “the boyfriend, very lucky, of Marjorie Taylor Greene.”
“Do you think it’s easy, being with Marjorie?” Trump asked DeSantis.
“I’m not going to answer that … kidding!!” Glenn later posted on X. Greene, he wrote, “is a joy to be with and I love her with all my heart.”
For Trump, the answer would end up being more complicated.
Greene stands with then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) on Jan. 6, 2022. The pair did a live stream interview with Glenn that day, on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol.© Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post
While Glenn had been cheerleading the president from the press pool, Greene had been showing an independent streak.
She’d been delicate about it, at first.
“To be clear, I love President Trump and everything he has done and is trying to do for this country,” she wrote on X in May, explaining her decision not to run for Senate by sounding off on Republican elites (including “political consultants embedded in the White House”).
In July, when Trump rankled the MAGA base by bombing Iranian nuclear sites, Greene criticized the move while making clear that she was not criticizing the president. “That’s not disloyalty,” she explained. “Critical thinking and having my own opinions is the most American thing ever.”
When she flamed Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and other Republicans over the government shutdown, she took pains to praise her commander in chief: “Whereas President Trump has a very strong, dominant style — he’s not weak at all — a lot of the men here in the House are weak.”
Nevertheless, Greene was staking out positions that ran counter to the president’s; besides the Epstein files and extending health care subsidies, Greene also called Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide.” She started swapping “MAGA” for “America First, America Only,” a slogan for a more extreme American isolationism and a hyperfocus on domestic issues. In November, after Republicans got beat badly in a series of off-year elections, she started talking about how the cost of living was still a problem — cutting against Trump’s narrative of an American “golden age.”
“I will give the president some credit that inflation has been holding around 2.5 percent, but people in my district are really struggling,” Greene told NBC then. “Rent and home prices continue to go up. The price of food continues to go up.”
A few days later, in the Oval Office, a reporter for CNN asked the president about Greene’s comments.
“I don’t know what happened to Marjorie,” Trump replied. “She’s a nice woman, but I don’t know what happened. She’s lost her way, I think.”
Glenn wasn’t at the White House that day. He’d traveled home to Texas to care for his mother, who was having back surgery. He remembers getting texts while at a Walgreens drive-through asking him about what the president had said about his girlfriend.
“I’m not going to lie to you,” Glenn told me. “It hurt.”
Then Trump started calling Greene a traitor online. And he revoked his endorsement of her.
That hurt even more.
“I never could have imagined how a nuclear bomb could go off over someone’s head the way it did that Friday,” Glenn said.
That weekend, back in Georgia, Glenn and Greene put up their Christmas tree and watched “Elf.” They went to the gun range, he said, to “blow off some steam.” But the political whirlwind Trump’s ire had kicked up was hard to shut out: There were pipe bomb threats, Glenn says. Hoax pizza deliveries. A deluge of hateful comments.
On Saturday afternoon, Glenn posted four pictures of him and Greene — hiking, smiling on a balcony in Washington, kissing by the beach.
“I love this woman,” he wrote in the caption. “I love this country. God bless America.”
But something had obviously broken. And ironically, it had been the MAGA firebrand, not the White House reporter, who had crossed a line with the president by telling a story that he didn’t like.
Greene speaks with Glenn in her Capitol Hill office in 2024.© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Greene had weighed quitting Congress “maybe a hundred times” since the drama started, Glenn told me. On Nov. 21, he sat with her in their Georgia home as she filmed herself explaining her decision to resign.
In the video, she reiterated that, yes, Americans are having trouble affording their lives. While establishment Republicans “secretly hate” the president, Greene said, she had defended him — including flying back to Washington while her father was having brain surgery to vote against impeaching the president over the Jan. 6 riot.
“Loyalty,” she said, “should be a two-way street.”
Speaking of loyalty — what about the man in the middle? Who would get Glenn in the divorce?
“Well, I gotta go with ‘Mom’ here,” he told me.
Glenn is giving up his White House gig and following her back to Georgia. “I’m not doing this fly-back-and-forth thing — not doing it, it’s not worth it,” he told me. Real America’s Voice is building him a studio near home in Georgia, he says. “I’ll do whatever content from there — either contribute to the network or do something else as well, another show or something.”
I asked Glenn if he plans to marry Greene. “I see that in the future for sure,” he said. But he wanted a future with Trump, too. “I will continue to support the president — I want to make sure that’s in the piece,” he told me. But he wasn’t certain that the feeling was still mutual.
“I haven’t seen him in person yet,” Glenn said. “That first interaction …”
A week later, the White House held an event in the Oval Office with automakers about lowering Biden-era fuel-efficiency standards. Trump digressed into a monologue about how Democrats’ messaging about affordability was a “con job.” When he finally opened the floor to the press, he called on Glenn first.
Glenn was ready to tee up the president: Didn’t an increase in online Black Friday spending counter the whole affordability narrative? But before he could get a word out, Trump had something to tell him.
“We love you, Brian.”
“Oh, I love you too, Mr. President,” Glenn replied.
That was never a question.
Greene and Glenn leave Capitol Hill for the day in 2024.© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
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