House Speaker Mike Johnson may have been looking for pity while lamenting his busy work schedule, but he became the butt of a joke instead.
“I haven’t had a vacation day in two years. I haven’t been off in two years, literally,” he told Katie Miller on her podcast this week.
Johnson and his wife Kelly spent much of their podcast appearance grumbling that they were constantly in “survival mode”—ordering food in rather than cooking—and MS NOW’s The Weekend Saturday panel was quick to jokingly “bless his heart” over the complaints.
The MS NOW panel began with a clip from the podcast, during which Johnson moaned: “Last Christmas, I was taking calls from members with their drama. It takes everything out of whomever serves in the position, and by extension, their family.”
The speaker added: “You’re sort of like a firefighter in a way. You put out fires every hour.”
Johnson later hinted that he wasn’t keeping up despite his best efforts, admitting: “I miss literally hundreds of calls and text messages in a day. The peril is, I don’t know how important it was, what I missed.”
Back in the studio, Jonathan Capeheart was seen with his head on the table as he shouted “Come on!,” while his co-host Eugene Daniels simply said: “Welcome to being speaker, sir.”
Daniels then highlighted certain phrases from the interview, before noting: “He’s saying all of this in kind of like… in his jokey, Southern way.
“But it does deep down say that he really is struggling to deal with the chaos of his conference.”
Rina Shah was next to rip into Johnson, with the panel devolving into laughter as she mocked: “Well, I’m a girl from the south, born and raised in West Virginia. So I’m just going to say, ‘Bless his heart.’”
She continued: “Wow. If I heard more whining than that… You know, what did the speakers do back in the day when there weren’t cell phones?”
“They went, they met, they shook hands and said, ‘Listen, we’re going to do the right thing and talk about passing some things for the American people.’ Instead of having to play defense all the time,” Shah continued.
Later in the discussion, lawyer George Conway asked how Johnson was able to “squeeze in that many lies” around his overloaded schedule, while noting that it would have been unimaginable for Nancy Pelosi to go on a similar tangent about the speaker role.
While Johnson was ridiculed on MS NOW for his countless complaints about being speaker, he did share one perk of the job during his podcast appearance: the opportunity to hang out with his idol, President Donald Trump.
“I’ve been able to go with the president to a lot of cool stuff,” Johnson enthused, recollecting the time they watched the LSU Tigers beat the Clemson Tigers back in 2020.
“I was with President Trump in the box while we won the championship,” he said. “That’s pretty cool.”
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