Trump’s Speaker

Johnson has an audience of one.

Earlier this week at Public Notice I pointed out that the Republicans are handling shutdown politics absurdly badly. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein has noticed the same thing—and is particularly confused by House Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to make the shutdown about Trump/Epstein.

Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to allow a newly elected Member to be sworn in, Democrat Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, presumably to prevent her from adding her name to a discharge petition and therefore moving forward the process of forcing a vote on releasing the Epstein files. It’s an astonishingly stupid choice!

· During a shutdown showdown in which Republicans basically have the high ground, Johnson is doing an obvious abuse of power— an easy to understand abuse, at that. I strongly suspect it’s one of the reasons that the “neutral” media isn’t blaming the Democrats.

· This also highlights Johnson’s decision to keep the House out of session during the shutdown. That too surely plays badly. The standard (and, to be sure, unfair) media interpretation is always that a chamber out of sessions is “not working.” In this case, not working while the nation is suffering from the shutdown.

· And of course Johnson is putting the Epstein scandal into a news cycle that might have been about everything but that.

More, as Bernstein says, Grijalva is eventually going to be sworn in, and then she’ll sign the discharge petition. “In exchange for perhaps saving his conference from a tough vote for a short time, he not only keeps the story in the news but appears to be participating in a cover-up,” Bernstein says. What’s the point?

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Johnson Hearts Trump

I think the point is Trump. In an authoritarian dictatorship, as I am not the first to mention, the dictator’s minions tend to behave as if they have an audience of one. When Pam Bondi sits before the Senate and attacks Democrats, she’s not really speaking to Senators, who are charged with overseeing her, nor to the American people, who are her employers. She’s speaking to Trump, who wants to see his minions perform partisan viciousness as a way to demonstrate their loyalty. She’s creating clips for Fox News, because the president wants to see his performing fascist seals performing fascism on Fox News.

I think this broadly applies to Mike Johnson as well. Before Johnson, Republican speakers struggled to balance loyalty to Trump with loyalty to their caucus and vulnerable members. The results were ugly; John Boehner, Paul Ryan, and Kevin McCarthy all were essentially forced out of office because they found it impossible to balance the demands of MAGA and the needs of voters of representatives in purple districts.

In Trump’s GOP, though, Johnson has found a solution. He just ignores the needs of moderate members, fucking them over again and again and again. He forced them to swallow an incredibly unpopular budget; he has demanded that they vote against releasing the Epstein files. He’s now demanding that they vote again to gut their constituent’s healthcare and that they spend an extended vacation talking to their constituents about Epstein.

For the most part, the moderates have just sucked it up, caving again and again and again and then again whenever necessary. There are various reasons for that dynamic—but a big one is that Trump has consistently backed Johnson, and members are terrified of bucking Trump, both because they worry about a primary and because they worry about death threats.

And why has Trump backed Johnson? For the obvious reason—Johnson backs Trump

It’s Trump who won’t seat Grijalva

The most logical reason that Johnson is refusing to seat Grijalva is that Trump does not want her seated because he does not want the Epstein files released.

Johnson almost certainly knows that this is counterproductive, that it hurts his members and will ultimately be futile. If he doesn’t know, he has plenty of members who I’m certain are informing him. But Trump is mostly disconnected from logic and from reality. He’s constitutionally incapable of balancing a couple of bad choices and acquiescing to the less bad. He wants what he wants; if he doesn’t get it, he throws a tantrum and tries to harm (politically and physically) the person giving him the bad news.

Past speakers have tried to govern by doing what the caucus wants. Johnson has instead decided to govern by doing whatever Trump wants, on the theory that the caucus will, however reluctantly, always bend the knee. That often leads to apparently baffling decisions, which cut against the interests of the House’s most vulnerable members, and sometimes (as here) against the interests of the Republican House as a whole. So far, though, it’s been a successful mode of governing—at least to the extent that Johnson has been able to pass Trump’s priorities and to retain his speakership.

Now, will this Speakership for an audience of one work forever? The future is always in motion, but one thing that you can generally count on as a rule of thumb is that nothing lasts forever. Trump’s approval continues to fall; the shutdown is going about as badly as it is possible for it to go for Republicans, we’re getting our first big electoral test of the new dictator Trump 2.0 in VA and NJ in a month and polling doesn’t look good. If Trump’s grip on the party, to say nothing of the electorate, continues to slip, Johnson is going to have to make some difficult decisions about his relationship with his God. For now, though, his thoughts, his prayers, and his public utterances and actions all seem directed at one drowsy orange visage.