The Speaker of the House Is Abetting Authoritarianism
Every Trump needs his Johnson: a flunky who will rationalize his crimes.
MIKE JOHNSON, THE REPUBLICAN SPEAKER of the House of Representatives, worries that the United States could become a dictatorship. At a press conference on Wednesday, he warned that “a Marxist ideology [is] taking over the Democrat party” and could soon be “turning us into a Communist country.” On Thursday, as he fielded calls on C-SPAN, Johnson invoked the language of The Communist Manifesto: “What if the socialists take over the Senate, and Democrat socialists are in charge, and they want to grow government and take over the means of production?”
Johnson isn’t wrong to fear dictatorship in this country. He’s just wrong about where that threat is coming from. It’s coming from his own party. And he’s paving the way.
To bring a democracy under authoritarian control, you need more than a strongman. You need politicians who will assure the public, as we slide toward one-man rule, that nothing odd is happening. That’s the role Johnson is playing in Donald Trump’s takeover of America.
On September 20, Trump all but ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to secure indictments and convictions against three political targets. “What about Comey, Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff, Leticia??? They’re all guilty as hell,” he instructed Bondi in a Truth Social post. “We can’t delay any longer . . . JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
Everyone saw Trump’s message. For days, it was the talk of the political world. But Johnson pretended it hadn’t happened. On September 28, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the speaker: “Don’t you have any qualms about any president telling an attorney general, ‘Go after these three political opponents?’” Johnson, with a straight face, replied, “I don’t think that’s what he did.”
Two days after that interview—and after Trump orchestrated Comey’s indictment by ousting a prosecutor and installing Lindsey Halligan, one of his own former personal attorneys, to get the job done—CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked the speaker about this plainly autocratic move. “My understanding is that the previous prosecutor refused to bring the case, because they didn’t think it was a strong enough case,” Sorkin observed. “So you have a situation where the president effectively directed their own lawyer to bring that case.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Johnson objected. He argued that Halligan’s decision to bring the case, after Trump fired the previous prosecutor for not bringing it, was a perfectly fine example of “the prosecutor’s discretion.”
On Thursday, Piers Morgan pressed Johnson about the “revenge act now going on against all of the Trump opponents,” starting with Comey. Morgan asked the speaker, “Do you feel comfortable about this?” In response, Johnson claimed that prosecuting Comey wasn’t just permissible; it was morally obligatory. “There’s a certain responsibility” to “make an example” of such people, Johnson argued—“not because they were on the wrong side of President Trump at some point, but because they lied to Congress.”
The notion that Trump cares about lying to Congress is comical. He pardoned Roger Stone, his intermediary in Russia’s 2016 election interference, after Stone was convicted of lying to Congress. Trump also pressured then-FBI Director Comey, unsuccessfully, to drop an investigation of Mike Flynn—and Trump later pardoned Flynn—for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia. Trump didn’t orchestrate the Comey indictment to send a message that you can’t lie to Congress or law enforcement. He did it to send a message that you can’t cross Trump.
Johnson is also happy to excuse Trump’s overt bigotry.
On September 29, Trump posted a fake video mocking Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, the House and Senate Democratic leaders, who had come to the White House to discuss legislation to avoid a government shutdown. The video inserted self-deprecating expletives in Schumer’s mouth. To bolster the Trump-Johnson lie that Democrats cared only about illegal immigrants, the video depicted Jeffries in a sombrero as Mexican music played in the background.
When Johnson was asked on CBS about the video and Jeffries’s unhappiness about it, he chided Jeffries. “He has to lighten up,” said Johnson. “The president was making a joke.”
At a press conference the next day, Johnson defended Trump again. “Is he trolling the Democrats? Yes,” said the speaker, smiling. “That’s what President Trump does. And people are having fun with this.”
This is the same Mike Johnson who once issued a report admonishing his colleagues that wasteful government programs were “not a laughing matter.”
AS TRUMP SENDS TROOPS into American cities against the will of state and local officials, Johnson—who calls himself a “constitutional law attorney”—stoutly defends the president.
On September 30, Trump told leaders of the U.S. armed forces that cities “run by the radical left Democrats . . . San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles—they’re very unsafe places. And we’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.”
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” said Trump. “We’re going into Chicago very soon.” He spoke of plans for a “quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within. And we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”
Two days later, when Johnson was asked about Trump’s menacing words, he said it wasn’t his department. “I don’t serve in the Pentagon. I run the House of Representatives,” he pleaded.
A week ago, Johnson went further. On Meet the Press, defended Trump’s plan to wage war in American cities, calling it “a war on crime.” In particular, he said Trump was justified in sending troops into Washington, D.C., because until that point—according to Johnson—the city had been “a literal war zone.”
When the president calls for the imprisonment of local officials who don’t cooperate with his military takeovers, Johnson defends that, too.
In a Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump declared, “Chicago Mayor should be in jail for failing to protect Ice Officers! Governor Pritzker also!”
Hours later, a reporter asked Johnson, “Do you agree that the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois should be in prison?” Johnson struggled with the question:
Should they be in prison? Um. (Pause) Should the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Illinois be in prison? Um. (Pause) I’m not the attorney general. I’m the speaker of the House, and I’m trying to manage the chaos here. I’m not following the day-to-day on that. I do know that they’ve resisted the introduction of, uh—[Johnson switched terms here to make it sound less like an invasion] or the offering of National Guard troops in Chicago, which is a terribly dangerous city . . .
That’s the sound of a man who will do nothing to challenge—and anything to justify—presidential violations of the Constitution, as long as the president is of his own party.
The American founders expected better leaders than Johnson. They thought Congress would check the president. They didn’t think one branch would surrender completely to another.
“Have you ever voted against anything that Trump set forth, as far as policy?” a caller asked Johnson on C-SPAN.
The speaker didn’t name a single thing. “I typically vote with President Trump, I do, because that’s my party,” he said.
And nothing Trump has done—the sham prosecutions, the threats of imprisonment, the invasions of American cities—has shaken that blind devotion.
Have you prayed about it, Mike? Is this what Jesus told you?
Such a good" Christian man. Apparently lying is a Christian virtue.
Trump is getting exactly what he wanted out of Johnson, and that's how Johnson has kept his job. This is what one should expect from any Republican Speaker of the House who desperately wants to stay Speaker of the House.
As far as talk of authoritarian takeovers by Communist Democrats, this is straight from the authoritarian playbook: fabricate an authoritarian threat from your opponents to justify the necessity of your own authoritarian movement to stop them.