Tuesday night, House Republicans presented to the public Representative Mike Johnson, their caucus’s new choice for House Speaker, surrounded by a jubilant cluster of supporters. “You helped lead the effort to overturn the election results,” ABC reporter Rachel Scott asked. The Republicans behind him jeered and shouted “Shut up!” Johnson smiled and shook his head. “Next question,” he said.
The effect of the scene was to imply the media was dredging up an unpleasant episode from Johnson’s past to besmirch his moment of triumph. But the reality is that Johnson’s efforts to hand Donald Trump an unelected second term are no mere biographical detail. His work on behalf of Trump’s autogolpe is the primary source of his leadership claim and the central reason he has managed to unify the party.
Trump was broadcasting his intentions to reject any potential defeat months in advance of the voting. Trump’s initial focus was delegitimizing emergency measures to allow people to vote safely during the pandemic. Since Trump was pushing his followers to believe the idea that COVID was fake and harmless, his plan was either to limit the franchise to those voters willing to cast in-person ballots, thereby winnowing COVID-cautious voters from the electorate, or else to retroactively throw out mail ballots, which he grasped would mainly be cast by Democrats.
After the votes came in, some Trump supporters developed more exotic theories to justify his refusal to leave office. Rudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, and other hangers-on began circulating wild claims that election machinery had been stolen. But other Trumpists returned to the president’s original plan of disqualifying mail ballots. Johnson played a central role in this effort.
Johnson, to that point a relatively obscure right-wing backbencher, threw himself behind Trump’s election-subversion crusade. At first, Johnson endorsed both Trump’s old mail-fraud claims and his newer voting-machine theories. In a friendly radio interview two weeks after the election, he said:
“A lot of us know intuitively that there was a lot amiss about this election day. The fact that all these states with democrat leaders changed the rules in the fourth quarter of the game … and the allegations of these voting machines some of them being rigged, with this software by Dominion, there is a lot of merit in that. And when the president says the election was rigged, that’s what he’s talking about. The fix was in …
In Georgia, it really was rigged. It was set up for the Biden team to win …
When you have a software system that is used across the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, when you have testimonials of people like this, but in large numbers, it begs to be litigated and investigated.”
But as the court challenges citing Dominion vote-rigging continued to lose, Johnson eventually trained his focus on the mail-in ballots. This, he proposed, gave Congress an opening to throw out the results and make Trump president. Leaning on his background as a constitutional lawyer, he crafted an argument that several states had improperly changed their voting rules in response to the pandemic, thus nullifying their results and allowing the Republican House to select the winner.
His case, stringing together a series of implausible legal claims, brought together many Republicans who were queasy at Trump’s wild lies, and Trump’s strongest supporters. Johnson circulated his case to the party and reminded them that Trump “anxiously awaited” their support. As the New York Times explained in a deeply reported story last year, Johnson’s arguments had a singular influence. About three-quarters of Republicans supporting Trump’s election challenge, the Times noted, “relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”
On December 9, Johnson tweeted, “President Trump called me this morning to let me know how much he appreciates the amicus brief we are filing on behalf of Members of Congress. Indeed, ‘this is the big one!’”
For nearly three years now, Republicans have been grappling with the fallout from Trump’s attempt to nullify the election results. But it is important to understand the nature of the dilemma. Republicans who objected to the coup attempt on first principles, like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, have mostly been driven out of the party. What remains of the “mainstream” wing objects to the coup plot on pragmatic grounds. Trump’s fixation on 2020 is backward-looking, unrelated to the main concerns of the voters, and likely to cost Republicans support in crucial states and districts.
Jim Jordan, also an enthusiastic Trumpist, was unacceptable to Establishment Republicans for similar reasons. Jordan’s ideas were not the problem so much as his testosterone-addled persona was off-putting.
Johnson bridged the gap by combining total commitment to Trump’s authoritarian ambitions with a soothing, low-key persona. When Johnson emerged as the caucus unity choice, Trump quickly offered a fulsome endorsement on his social-media outlet: “My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!” Matt Gaetz, whose mission in public life has been to position himself as more right-wing than anybody else, gushed that Johnson had “enthusiastic support” across the party.
The immediate reviews in the Washington media underscore the basis of his mainstream appeal. “Johnson has a reputation as a bookish wonk with the sort of policy foundation that hasn’t been seen in a potential GOP speaker since PAUL RYAN relinquished the gavel,” reports Politico. “Johnson isn’t a public firebrand like Jordan,” writes Punchbowl, which covers Congress. “Johnson is more difficult to demonize because he has a low profile.”
These thumbnail characterizations illustrate the fallacy of using personal style as an ideological gauge. Johnson’s persona may be low-key, but if Hannah Arendt taught us nothing else, the most sinister designs can be delivered in the most banal guise. Trump’s personality remains controversial within the Republican Party. But his core belief that Democratic election victories are inherently illegitimate has triumphed completely. That belief is propelling Trump to the presidential nomination again, and it has propelled Johnson from obscurity to his role as the highest-ranking elected Republican in the United States.
