Wow, how very shocking: It turns out that new House Speaker Mike Johnson had a lot of bad things to say about Donald Trump before the Republican Party staked its entire identity and future on the man. From The New York Times:
“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015, before he was elected to Congress and a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.
Johnson also wrote that Trump could "break more things than he fixes," being "a hot head by nature," which "is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief."
Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also questioned what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely disrespecting him? I am only halfway kidding about this. I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”
We, of course, know the rest of the story. Like every other Republican lawmaker still in the party, Johnson changed his tune after Trump won in 2016, and by 2020, Johnson had become a Class-A suckup who played a major role in propagating Trump’s lies that the presidential election had been "rigged" against him. Trump can now do no wrong, and when Trump is impeached or indicted for what appear to be blatant crimes, Mike Johnson is always in his corner, parroting Trump's declarations that it is the prosecutors who are corrupt.
Johnson's Trump conversion is the story of modern Republicanism condensed down to one man. Johnson rose to public office banging on about his so-called morality, a man who aligned himself with hate groups and whose Bible-thumping appeared to focus almost exclusively on the alleged evils of homosexuality rather than any of that nonsense about feeding the poor.
But the moment he had power to protect, it became evident that the "moral center" he had been talking about was one that allowed him to attack his self-identified cultural enemies while defending a parade of crimes from his allies. It was all a farce from the beginning.
And that is modern Republicanism. An astonishing amount of horseshit gets tossed around about morality and societal decay and how dare so-and-so do such-and-such, and in the end, it's all a cover for "And by the way, members of our party are allowed to do crimes now."
There's no condemnation of Trump for goading a crowd into attacking Congress to stop its certification of his election loss. There's no announcement that Trump shouldn't lift phrases from Adolf Hitler's most genocidal rhetoric. When Trump is caught hoarding a stock of classified military secrets at his for-profit club/home, having a "moral center" now means that he's allowed to do that, and that the government workers who went to get them back are the party's enemies.
Mike Johnson doesn't have a g-ddamn moral bone in his body. It was a grift from the beginning, and it's a grift now. The party purges those who allow ethics and morality to guide them, scrubbing even hard-line conservatives like former Rep. Liz Cheney when simple moral edicts like "it is unacceptable to attempt to overthrow the government" get applied to a corrupt and indecent sack of crimes like Donald Trump.
So yes, Johnson probably is indeed the perfect Republican to lead the now-fascist, hate-riddled crime family that has captured Republicanism and nearly all of conservatism besides. If he doesn't work out—and there are a lot of toe bones sticking out from under his closet door, and it's not likely all the skeletons inside are just recently stowed Halloween decorations—then not to worry, House Republicans have at least a hundred other "moral" Republicans just like him.
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The band is back together, and it is a glorious day as Markos and Kerry’s hot takes over the past year came true—again! Republicans continue to lose at the ballot box and we are here for it!
