Sean Hannity Lets Marjorie Taylor Greene Peddle Her Secessionist Fantasies on Live Television

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene took her campaign for a “national divorce” to Fox News on Tuesday, unveiling details of her plan to Sean Hannity, who appeared somewhat open to the idea that the United States should be split into autonomous zones as a means of avoiding a second civil war. “The last thing I ever want to see in America is a civil war,” the Georgia Republican told the Fox News host. “No one wants that—at least everyone I know would never want that—but it’s going that direction, and we have to do something about it.”

Rather than a clean split that would result in the creation of two countries, Greene’s pitch appears closer to a kind of balkanization that would allow each state to become a self-contained, self-governing body. It also involves temporarily stripping voting rights from Americans who move to red states from blue ones—a point that Hannity, for his part, agreed with. “Banning people who move from blue states to red states from voting for five years so they don’t bring their bad politics with them—I actually favor that idea,” the host said. (The proposed voting ban dovetails with comments Greene made earlier that day, when Turning Point USA cofounder Charlie Kirk asked Greene how Republican states could “stop” Democratic voters from “trying to invade our states or our counties.”)

In the Hannity segment, Greene also claimed that recent conversations she’s had with aggrieved conservatives prove the nation is at a breaking point. “Everyone I talk to is sick and tired and fed up of being bullied by the left, abused by the left, and disrespected by the left,” the firebrand said. “Our ideas, our policies, our ways of life have become so far apart that it’s just coming to that point.” When asked by Hannity whether she expects her plan to materialize, Greene replied, “It’s something that we should work towards because it’s kind of the vision that our founding fathers had for America, and I think it’s a great one.”

Greene, who revealed her secessionist views in a Presidents’ Day tweet, has since faced a chorus of condemnation from Democrats—and even some Republicans. Spencer Cox, the Republican governor of Utah, called the lawmaker’s rhetoric “destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil,” adding, “We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling. And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart.” Likewise, Senator Mitt Romney, another Utah Republican, described the notion as “insanity.” Still, Cox and Romney are among a small group of GOP notables to criticize Greene, and most Republicans have stayed notably mum on the issue.

Since helping Kevin McCarthy secure his hard-fought—if not Pyrrhic—victory for the House Speakership last month, Greene has quickly become a leading voice in the majority. After being stripped of her committee seats in 2021, McCarthy awarded her appointments to the oversight and homeland security committees—two highly coveted posts. She was also appointed to the congressional subcommittee charged with probing the nation’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Greene is far from the first contemporary Republican to claim that states have the right to secede. In 2010, Nikki Haley, then a South Carolina gubernatorial candidate, falsely claimed that states have a constitutionally protected right to leave the union should they so choose, according to a new report from CNN’s KFile. Haley, who launched her 2024 presidential campaign this month, made the remarks during an interview with a “Southern culture” advocacy group. At the time, a Confederate battle flag was flown on the South Carolina statehouse grounds—a placement that Haley defended in the interview. “This is not something that is racist,” she said of the flag. “This is something that is a tradition that people feel proud of…. And that the flag [is] where it is was a compromise of all people that everybody should accept as part of South Carolina.”

Haley did not call for the flag’s removal until the summer of 2015, after a white supremacist gunned down nine worshippers at a historic Black church in Charleston. In response to the CNN report, Haley spokesperson Ken Farnaso told the outlet that “Haley’s groundbreaking leadership on removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina Capitol grounds is well known.”