Hello and welcome back to The Best & The Brightest. I’m Tina Nguyen.

Tonight, why Marjorie Taylor Greene’s current threat to vacate Speaker Mike Johnson might be the most dangerous leadership challenge yet—not just because the House is a “shit show,” as one source of mine put it, where anything could happen, but because today’s extremely broken G.O.P. might not be able to put itself back together afterwards. And what Greene, the most public avatar of this new generation of molotov-chucking lawmakers, really wants…

But first, the topline readout from our Congress expert Abby Livingston…

• G.O.P. in crisis: For the past decade and a half, Republicans have waged their civil wars in primaries. But this week marks the most striking policy fight in years—if not ever. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, J.D. Vance, and The Heritage Foundation are fighting tooth and nail to cut funding for the Ukrainian defense. They’re up against Speaker Mike Johnson and several powerful chairmen who came up in politics during the Reagan era, namely Michael McCaul, Mike Turner, Mike Rogers, and Tom Cole. (Case in point: Don Jr. went after McCaul on Wednesday on Twitter.) Democrats, meanwhile, seem inclined to back both Ukrainian funding and Johnson. Expect some strange vote whipping over the next few days.
• Johnson’s crunch time: The vote is expected to take place on Saturday night, after which the House will let out for a recess and members will return to their home districts for a week. (As a point of reference, Kevin McCarthy’s ouster effectively began on the afternoon of Saturday, Sept. 30, when he ushered through a bipartisan spending bill to avoid a shutdown. He was out the following Tuesday.) With Johnson now facing his own potential defenestration, insiders will be closely watching what transpires during that nine-day interim.

  On the one hand, with members spread out across the country, there will be fewer face-to-face opportunities to build momentum for his ouster. On the other hand, the general rule of thumb for recesses (at least since last summer) has been that the Republican infighting upon return is almost always more dreadful than even the worst expectations. The White House Correspondents Dinner should draw dozens of members back to Washington late next week, but the members who might be plotting to bring down Johnson aren’t exactly the type to make the rounds at these parties.

• Rockbridge over troubled waters: Donald Trump is set to speak to the Rockbridge Network, the ascendant MAGA-inflected donor group, which is meeting at Mar-a-Lago this evening, I’m told. Trump himself will be in New York, of course, where he’s spending four days a week in a courtroom. But he will address the group by phone, per one of the sources.

  Rockbridge, a donor group co-founded by Trump V.P. hopeful J.D. Vance and his close political ally, Chris Buskirk, has mega-watt supporters ranging from Peter Thiel to Rebekah Mercer. (I did a deep dive on the group, which is still relatively new, in the middle of last year.) That it is getting attention from Trump—it’s the second time he has spoken to the group—means you should pay attention to it, too.

Johnson refused, and has said he’s not worried, intuiting—perhaps correctly—that the mutineers will lose their nerve. Indeed, if you talk to conservatives on the Hill, they confess to holding two competing sentiments: On one hand, for a party in the majority (barely), they feel completely out of control of their own agenda, having been unable to advance anything since Kevin McCarthy’s ouster in October, and would happily toss Johnson off the Speaker’s Balcony if only for cathartic relief. Their grievances are manifold: the FISA renewal, a stand-alone Ukraine funding bill, a failed Israel vote, a $1.2 trillion budget that passed with Democratic votes, Johnson’s talent for caving to Chuck Schumer after promising conservatives the moon. After venting, however, they will grudgingly acknowledge that, on the other hand, a defenestration sequel is playing with fire. “Again, there is no alternative to Johnson,” a Republican insider told me, possibly for the hundredth time since murmurs about another motion to vacate started to emerge in January. “No one else can get the votes.”

So why has Greene, who is by all accounts a more strategic player than she lets on, lit the match? The second-term Georgia congresswoman, after all, is in somewhat of a precarious position, herself. A prolific House fundraiser and perennial MAGA favorite, she nonetheless tempted fate by closely aligning herself with McCarthy, getting herself expelled from the House Freedom Caucus (for calling Lauren Boebert “a little bitch”), and then putting the motion-to-vacate gun to Johnson’s head—placing herself smack-dab in the middle of his more-or-less friendly relationship with Donald Trump.

There’s little risk of her losing her seat—Greene last won reelection with two-thirds of the vote—but if she has higher aspirations, king-killing is a risky business. Indeed, her desire to placate the activist base, elevate her station in Congress, and avoid pissing off Trump or exasperating her colleagues requires either complex political choreography, or an unprecedented run of sheer luck. “She has legit gripes,” the Republican insider told me. “Nobody believes she will pull the trigger.”

But boy, is she getting close. In the past few days, her social media feeds have surfaced a list of grievances about how Johnson funded abortion, jumped into bed with the Dems, and so forth; her TV and radio appearances have skyrocketed; her fundraising blasts have positioned her as a defender of America and Johnson as “drunk on Swamp water.” This has, in predictably memetic fashion, made Johnson’s political failures even more visible. Earlier today, Reps. Ralph Norman, Chip Roy, and Massie buttonholed Johnson in an attempt to persuade him to combine the border issue with foreign aid. “Where is border security?!” one of Greene’s MAGA allies texted me this week, in all caps, shortly after Johnson announced that he would break the Senate foreign aid legislation into three pieces—one each for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan—with immigration to be addressed separately. (Border security, it seems, is the new Infrastructure Week.)

It is that instability that risks everything going to hell, one senior G.O.P. aide told me. “If I pull the pin out of a grenade, and I count to three, and I put it back in, it doesn’t necessarily mean I’m trying to kill you or kill myself, ” he said. “But it indicates I’m closer to that. She may have never intended to blow anything up, but she's messing around with something that could explode.”

Greene’s unsettled place in the MAGA-verse stems, in part, from her original decision to align with McCarthy. It was a clever move by McCarthy to befriend Greene—he gave a personal tour of the Capitol to Greene’s wheelchair-bound grandmother, and empowered her standing in Congress by assigning her to committees like Oversight and Homeland Security. Another time, he enlisted his own general counsel to help her get her Twitter account back.

During that era, Greene was the consummate team player. “She got into this relationship and then really bought into [the idea of], here’s how we win together as a conference,” a former senior House G.O.P. aide told me. McCarthy had been a leader who enforced order: He knew the institution, raised boatloads of money, got members elected, put them on committees, and kept legislation moving. But Greene’s pact with McCarthy damaged her standing among House hardliners, especially the people allied with Matt Gaetz, who ultimately rallied Republicans to remove McCarthy. And once Johnson was installed in his stead, she no longer enjoyed the open-door access that she once had with McCarthy—nor did his replacement have anything close to McCarthy’s political power, talent, or ability to lead.

And without a robust leader, the House G.O.P. has devolved into a Hobbesian quagmire: stuck in near-constant state of war, with members huddling into tribes, trying to take out their ostensible colleagues (see: Gaetz backing primary challengers to Representatives Tony Gonzales of Texas and Mike Bost of Illinois), or leaving Congress altogether. What would stop Greene from going rogue in a lawless House?

“There’s no structure, there’s no unified mission. They cut the head off the snake. And now it’s the Wild West,” said the former House aide. “In the same way that we impeach everybody now, why not just M.T.V. all the time, or take a rule down? The institution sucks right now. And I think Marjorie’s angst is a product of that. And I would say it’s less about her personally.”

Johnson’s enemies have subsequently spent considerable time reading past the substance of his bills and focusing on his strategy: What awful bill is he going to cram down our throats now—and how can we stop it? Their approach to the upcoming foreign aid votes is a prime example. Though Johnson’s pitched Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan as three separate votes, the hardliner faction has zeroed in on the fact that he intends to bring them to the floor using a procedure that would force members to actually take those votes—they can’t vote to fund aid to Israel, for instance, without having to go on the record on Ukraine, too. And since Ukraine funding will likely pass if it comes up, Heritage Action and Russ Vought, a prominent outside ally to the hardliner bloc, have both recommended voting the rule down altogether.

Greene, I’m told, has a distaste for procedural pedantry. But tanking the Johnson agenda through the rules process is very different from nuking the Louisiana congressman outright. And when someone as diehard populist as Eli Crane says that he won’t get rid of Johnson, the nuclear option is a much harder sell. “The reality is that Johnson is determined to try to make law and let the House members vote on each of these provisions,” a Johnson ally told me. “If Marjorie and a few members want to bring a motion, then they will. We’ll fight it on the floor.”

What does this mean for M.T.G.? Time and again, Trump has shown himself incapable of making any calculation that involves sacrificing anything in the short term. Greene, along with more and more Republicans, seem to believe that is a strategy, and not an Achilles heel. But such is life in a Republican party where civil structure, norms, institutional practices and decorum have broken down. “The more that you can take note of how toxic and destroyed the institution is right now,” sighed the former House aide, “the more that tells the story of what’s going on.”