Speaker Mike Johnson dialed up the outage card as he tried to defend Donald Trump’s call for the execution of Democratic lawmakers.
Johnson stepped in to defend the president’s rhetoric—not by endorsing it outright, but by shifting blame onto the Democrats.
Trump’s Truth Social posting slammed into overdrive after six Democratic lawmakers, who are all veterans, released a direct message to U.S. service members, telling them that they can and must “refuse illegal orders.”
Trump responded with a post reading, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH,” and even reposted a Truth Social user who wrote, “HANG THEM GEORGE WASHINGTON WOULD!!”
Johnson attempted to defend the president’s language, dismiss it, and scold Democrats all in the same breath as reporters hunted him down on Capitol Hill to get his take on Trump’s wild posts.
He told reporters the uproar was misplaced. According to him, Trump was simply “defining the crime of sedition.”“That is a factual statement,” he said, insisting that lawyers would need to “parse” the statute. It was Democrats, he claimed, who were acting “wildly inappropriate.”
Johnson acknowledged he hadn’t seen the full string of Trump’s comments, an excuse the Speaker frequently leans on. He nonetheless joined the president in going after the six Democrats who had addressed military personnel.
“For a senator like Mark Kelly or any member of the House or Senate to behave in that kind of talk is to me so just beyond the pale,” he said, abruptly ending with, “I’m not going to say anything more on it.”
Some Republicans weren’t buying Trump’s wording. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said, “I don’t agree with that,” though he still dragged Democrats for being “ill-advised and provocative and unnecessary.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified that Trump did not literally want lawmakers executed, and Johnson tried again.“The words that the president chose are not the ones that I would use,” he said. “Obviously, I don’t think that… these are crimes punishable by death or any of that.”
Still, he doubled down on the central grievance. “Members of Congress in the Senate [and] House should not be telling troops to disobey orders. It is dangerous.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer torched the entire episode in a floor speech, warning that Trump “is lighting a match in a country soaked with political gasoline.”
“Every senator, every representative, every American, regardless of party, should condemn this immediately and without qualification,” Schumer said. “Because if we don’t draw a line here, there is no line left to draw.”
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