You could almost mistake it for an ad. Last week, the far-right Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was on the Amtrak Crescent traveling from the nation’s capital to her home state, and she was enchanted. “The sweetest people run the train,” she posted on X, alongside a video of the autumnal landscape rushing by. “And the morning views of my north Georgia mountains made me smile and warmed my heart.”
As Greene said, she’d wound up on the train because of “flight delays and cancellations,” a result of the government shutdown. (Thousands of flights have been canceled over the past week, and delays have been common as unpaid air traffic controllers are overworked or walk off the job entirely.) Previously, Greene had been no particular fan of the train—in 2021, she voted against the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that earmarked $66 billion to rehabilitate the country’s woefully out-of-date rail network—yet now she was embracing its charms.
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