Mike Johnson is a mess. The House Speaker (R-LA) has spent weeks stumbling through the federal government shutdown, dragging the Republican Party into chaos, and all while playing second fiddle to Donald Trump.
“It’s been a tough month for the beleaguered speaker,” David Lurie wrote for Public Notice. “After shutting down the House weeks ago to avoid a vote to compel Trump to release the Epstein files, these days Johnson holds news conferences multiple times a week to ‘explain’ why Republicans are so determined to make Affordable Care Act health coverage prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans that they are, literally, taking food out of the mouths of babies.”
Johnson’s strategy—or lack thereof—is constantly undercut by Trump’s erratic shutdown narrative. The president’s absence from the negotiations leaves Johnson scrambling to defend a party position that is increasingly indefensible.
Democrats are standing firm. They demand an extension of ACA subsidies for millions of people as a condition for reopening the government. Some may be looking for a bipartisan off-ramp, but Johnson isn’t negotiating—he’s explaining a disaster.
“Johnson has compounded what is becoming a full-blown disaster for his party by appointing himself to make the case for Republicans’ politically irrational, and increasingly amoral, course of conduct,” Lurie wrote. “The speaker is a bad explainer, to say the least. Nearly every time he (and more rarely Trump) appears before the cameras to sell the GOP’s lies, he manages to unintentionally tell the truth — or, as Johnson puts it, ‘get lost in facts.'”
And it’s not just the shutdown. Johnson has to answer for brutal immigration raids rounding up innocent people, Trump pardoning a crypto billionaire, and a million other crises. Usually, his response is the same: he isn’t aware of it and has no comment.
Lurie nailed the broader consequence: “Because Trump and his fellow GOP ‘leaders’ have made their refusal to negotiate with Democrats a bizarre ‘principle,’ when — as seems increasingly certain — they’re forced to make a deal to reopen the government, Trump, the self-styled dictatorial strongman, will end up substantially diminished. But at least we can hope the poor children of our very rich nation will come out of the imbroglio Trump and Johnson have manufactured with sufficient food to eat.”
In short, Johnson isn’t just incompetent—he’s a puppet, a bad explainer, and a man who has tied the Republican Party to Trump’s every whim. Millions of Americans are watching, stuck in the crossfire of a shutdown that could have been prevented, all because the speaker knows nothing and refuses to stand up.
