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Republicans in the House of Representatives finally broke their deadlock on Wednesday. It was the middle of the afternoon. And after three weeks of leaderless chaos, Louisiana’s Mike Johnson took the gavel to become speaker of the House. If you’re wondering, Mike who? You’re not alone. Mike Johnson has been in office less than seven years. And he was the fourth candidate for the job this month. He got shoved into the spotlight—fast.
His introductory speech offered a lot to think about. Johnson offered a personal biography, speaking about his dad, who was a firefighter. He talked a lot about God. He said he’d been moved to tears on the floor of Congress, overwhelmed by the enormity of his responsibility.
“That said, there’s a lot in his speech that was bullshit,” said Tim Miller, who spent years as a Republican strategist. I called up Miller, who now writes for the Bulwark, to help me read between the lines. “The speech included these overwrought comments about the lack of institutional trust and how he’s there to regain that. That’s a nice thing to say, I guess. But he didn’t do anything to demonstrate that he wants to regain that trust. In fact, Mike Johnson’s been somebody that’s been actively working to erode trust.”
What Miller means here is that this pious-seeming guy, who’s been pretty anonymous until now, has been fighting in the trenches for the conservative movement for a long time, including as the main architect of one of Donald Trump’s schemes to flip the 2020 election.
“He was whipping people to try to vote to overturn the election,” Miller said. “He also was advancing some of the more crazy conspiracy theories, like the Dominion conspiracy that the voting machines were rigged.”
When Rep. Matt Gaetz went on Steve Bannon’s show to talk about Mike Johnson, he called him “MAGA Mike,” Miller said. But Johnson would never describe himself that way. That’s why Johnson is the “Goldilocks candidate, because his actions are everything that the people that listen to Steve Bannon’s podcast want. But his affect and his words are collegial.”
The House may finally have a speaker, but on Thursday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Miller about how this “Goldilocks candidate” means the chaos is far from over. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Mary Harris: Mike Johnson’s name first broke through the noise on Tuesday night. Can you just lay out who he is, what he believes? What do we know about his background?
Tim Miller: Johnson is from Shreveport, northwest Louisiana. In a different era, he would have been pretty much a Rick Santorum–type Republican. Just Christian conservative, cares a lot about social issues—things in the gays and abortion and religious freedom space. That is his natural place within the party, as part of the socially conservative wing. But as he has gotten into Congress, he has developed pretty good relationships with Steve Scalise and with the Republican leadership. He’s demonstrated he’s the kind of guy who can do interviews and not sound like a crazy person, which is an important bar to pass in the Republican Party these days.
Yeah, sounding reasonable seems like his superpower.
It is. And he also recognized the Trump rise within the party and really was lockstep with Trump.
He caught a shooting star. He would travel with Donald Trump, and then he got very involved in Jan. 6, in the litigation around it.
Yes. He wasn’t like Elise Stefanik. He wasn’t somebody that flipped and then became an ostentatious defender of Trump. He was more like an operational defender of Trump on the Hill. And Donald Trump likes those kind of people.
Henchmen.
Someone he feels like he could cast in the role of a henchman. And Mike Johnson really does. And he has a lot of cred on the right because of his advocacy on social issues.
And we should be clear, he made this constitutional argument against Joe Biden’s victory in 2020, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. And again, making it sound reasonable, saying like, “Listen, there was a pandemic, and that meant there were all these changes to how elections worked. And really, the legislature should be making those changes. That’s what it says in the Constitution. But it was these other people, elections officials. And so it’s like, Meh, those votes don’t count the same way.” And you can see how he’s drawing the lines, even if you disagree with the outcome of what he’s saying.
Yeah, I went to the Louisiana GOP convention a couple of months ago now to cover it for the Bulwark. And this is a very MAGA crowd. And Johnson’s remarks were very well received. And he’s articulate and sounded intelligent. Louie Gohmert had also spoken at this thing; he didn’t sound like Louie Gohmert. And so I heard that and I was like, “Man, this guy is somebody to watch because he’s figured out how to give these guys the right MAGA red meat while also having an acceptable presentation for Face the Nation.” That demonstrates why he is somebody they turned to, because this is something that the Republicans desperately need.
They essentially had two groups in the party: They had the people that were basically old, pre-MAGA Republicans that were pretending on the MAGA stuff in order to survive—that is your Tom Emmers and your McCarthys and your Patrick McHenrys. And then you had the MAGA members that are all just a little too weird to do the Face the Nation thing and to do the ceremonial elements of the speakership that you have to do.
And Johnson demonstrated that you can be a wild-eyed MAGA extremist who wants to turn the country into a Donald Trump autocracy and talk about it in a way that kind of sounds like you’re the captain of a high school debate team and drink milk for lunch and have a podcast about religion with your wife, which he does.
Mike Johnson didn’t really emerge as a potential speaker until a few days back, and even then, he wasn’t a front-runner. Initially, Tom Emmer won the party’s nomination, but he quickly dropped out once it was clear he wouldn’t have the support of the MAGA wing. In the end, there were three candidates left, and Johnson came out on top.
My sense was that the reason why Johnson was able to elevate above the other two was because among the more “normal” establishment Republicans, whatever you want to call them, they were more drawn to Johnson. And Johnson had built good, trustworthy relationships with leadership.
Looking at the winners and losers of this speaker fight, it’s notable to me that Jim Jordan did not win the gavel, but Johnson did. And to me, it made me wonder: What does it mean? Like, what are the issues that are important to Republicans? Because Johnson and Jordan seem very similar when it comes to substance, but just different in style. It made me wonder if this is a party of optics at this point.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I thought. I just wrote about this for the Bulwark. If this was an ideological fight, this would have been over weeks ago. If this was over some policy issue or some ideology, then after McCarthy was deposed, whoever started it and whoever their allies are would have gone to the conference and said, “We will only go for a speaker that will do X, Y, and Z.” There would be some specific thing that they wanted, but there wasn’t anything like that. They had distaste for McCarthy and wanted to demonstrate power over him and wanted to demonstrate that the MAGA elements within the party were the ones that were in control, not the old establishment pre-Trump guys who had been around forever.
To me, what was so weird was people like Ken Buck, who said they couldn’t vote for Jim Jordan because of Jan. 6, but then all the Republicans lined up behind Johnson, who was the architect of election denialism.
So, you have your Kay Grangers and your other appropriator types—Tom Kean and these old bulls, if you will—and they went against Jordan. And some of that was interpersonal. Jordan, for a long time, had been a thorn in their side. And so some of this was just good old high school cafeteria stuff. But I also think some of it was optics. They did not feel like he was somebody that should be the face of the party. And they feel like Johnson could be. I think that they’re in for a rude awakening. And I think that a lot of folks are going to be regretting their votes
It’s funny because earlier in the week we did a show about the speaker mess in D.C., and I said it was a “make-or-break week” for Republicans. So I’m curious: Which was it? Was it make or break or both?
I think it was “make” in the short term, but I think that they run a very big risk of “break” by next year. Let me explain why. Back when I was a Republican, we used to use the specter of Nancy Pelosi to really hurt suburban Democratic candidates and certainly red-state Democratic candidates. Like, so-and-so from Georgia voted 92 percent of the time with a San Francisco liberal who wants to do all these far-left things—30-second ads, they write themselves. The Democrats are now going to give the Republicans a taste of their own medicine on this front. And all 18 of those guys in Biden districts and even a handful that are in close Trump districts, now they have voted for and empowered somebody as speaker of the House, as the leader of their party, who was complicit in the effort to overturn the election, supports bans on abortion with no exceptions, has had extremely far-out anti-gay legislation—not just the “don’t say gay” stuff in Florida, but he wanted to allow gay sex to be criminalized. And not to mention a climate change denier, who wants to slash Social Security and Medicare. And I think it’s going to hurt these guys to have to run and say, “OK, I’m on board with the Trump reelect and one of his top lieutenants who’s this Louisiana extreme evangelical.” I don’t think that that plays in these California and New York districts that are the reason why Republicans have the House majority right now.
Let’s talk about what happens now. Johnson is saying he’s going to move really fast. He’s trying to jam through legislation this week, but he’s new to the job. He still doesn’t really have a staff. You’ve worked behind the scenes with politicians for a long time. Is moving fast possible for Mike Johnson?
It might be possible on a couple of things. I don’t know what the deal was on the continuing resolution. That’s the thing to watch. The government shutdown isn’t until November, so we’ll see how quickly they can move on that.
Some of the stuff is back to optics. Can he move fast on the bill that says we condemn Hamas? Yeah, I guess. But I think that the thornier elements to this are going to be more complicated than he realizes.
Like, actually funding things.
Yeah. I saw a list of things, like, “We’re going to do the farm bill by the end of the year.” And it’s like, OK, brother, I don’t know. I feel like an old guy now, saying, “Back in my day.” But I’ve been in D.C. during two farm bills when there were speakers and majorities that were decently effective and did get things passed where that thing got delayed forever because there are all these random contingencies that you don’t think of. You know, the sugar people are mad at the corn people. So, this guy with a staff of eight and a bunch of people that are just new, and he has never really had to do anything. He’s not in a competitive district and now he’s got to go raise money and do all of this stuff to prepare for 2024. He’s behind the eight ball. He’s got to fund the government. They got to figure out what to do with the Ukraine. I think that it’s going to be a steeper learning curve than he presented.
Is Johnson going to be governed by the same rules Kevin McCarthy was haunted by? Like, the rule that any member of the caucus can try to boot him out at any time if he strays from the rules.
He is. But technically, Paul Ryan was also governed by that, and they just never really did it. And so, I think that he’s in the sweet spot. Mike Johnson has been a down-the-line right-wing congressman. There’s charts going around of all of the controversial votes (among the Republican conference) since Kevin McCarthy has gotten in—the debt ceiling bill and keeping the government open and gay marriage—and Johnson was on the side of the crazies on every single one. So, what reason would they have to overthrow him? And there’s no signs that the more “moderate” folks are going to show the backbone to use the same types of tactics that Matt Gaetz did. So he’ll probably be clear on that front.
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One of the most important things Johnson’s going to have to do is reach spending agreements with the Senate and the president, and he’s been so vocal in the past about the need to slash spending on entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. What does that mean for these debates and conversations?
The Ukraine thing is the biggest threat right now. So I think that’s issue No. 1.
Because he’s voted against Ukraine funding in the past.
Yeah, every time. And there’s been no even whispers that that was part of the deal to get him through. I felt this way about McCarthy when he first got in: Everybody gets one pass. I do think that he’ll get a pass to deal with the budget in a way that can get through the Senate and onto the president’s desk. I don’t know if there’ll be additional wheeling and dealing on that or what that’s going to look like exactly. But I think that he’ll get some leash within the Republican conference to do that. But in the future, I think that we’re looking at severe, severe brinksmanship on government funding in 2024.
So you’re saying don’t be fooled if things look normal for the next couple months.
That’s what I’m saying. I think that he will revert to the hard-line ideologue that he’s been.
You spent years as a Republican operative. And I thought it would be interesting to talk to you in this moment, because I feel like I’ve just lived through these wild swings of Republican identity during this speaker race. Like, literally Tuesday, there was someone who was a speaker-designate who believed the polar opposite of what the current speaker now elected believes, according to votes. I wonder: Do you feel like Johnson’s election really points to what the Republican Party is now?
I do. I don’t even know, actually, if Johnson is the final manifestation of what the Republican Party is now. The animating issues for Republicans right now are completely different than they were 20 years ago. There’s some similarities. There obviously is a line from Pat Buchanan to now and a line from Newt Gingrich to now. But if you asked somebody in 1996 in the House Republican Conference, what are the things that animate you? It’s smaller government, lower taxes, maybe abortion, strong military. Like, that’s the old three-legged stool of the Republican Party. If you ask the new class of Republicans what it is now, it’s wokeness. It is immigration. It is receding America from the world. And, maybe it’s also, for some of them, smaller government and abortion. There are some things that overlap, but there have been other issues that are totally changed. And the types of politicians that were those old Chamber of Commerce Republicans that have been hanging on in the House, they are representatives of a time gone by.
They’re dinosaurs.
Yeah. It was only a matter of time before they were overthrown. And frankly, they lasted longer than I expected.
