PARRISH, Fla. — Adam Johnson poured Scotch into a coffee mug, logged on to Zoom and steeled himself for his plea hearing. He concentrated on looking contrite.
Johnson was among the most infamous of the Donald Trump supporters who had roamed the halls of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He’d found House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s lectern and was carrying it into the Rotunda when he waved to a news photographer and flashed an impish grin. He’d gone viral, becoming an instant meme in a Trump knit hat.
Two days later, the police arrested him, and within a year he cut a deal and pleaded guilty to trespassing. “Your honor, I understand that my actions are regretful,” he told the judge who heard his case. Although he knew he’d broken the law, he silently stewed, believing he was a victim of government retribution and convinced that violent actors were the ones who deserved punishment.
“Saying I’m guilty,” he said during four hours of recent interviews, “betrays my fundamental belief that I had a right to go protest.”
Now — after serving 75 days behind bars and receiving a presidential pardon like other Jan. 6 participants — Johnson is reveling in his notoriety as he runs for a seat on the Board of Commissioners for Manatee County, which is sandwiched between Tampa and Sarasota. Johnson has rarely voted and doubts the 2020 election was conducted fairly, but he is now putting enough confidence in the country’s political system to run for office.
When U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton sentenced Johnson in February 2022, he warned that the country was on a “dangerous slide” and could slip into armed conflict. He urged Johnson to read “The Next Civil War” and “How Civil Wars Start.”
Johnson didn’t read the two books. Stephen Marche, the author of “The Next Civil War,” said he wished he had.
“He is really the essence of the crisis that America is in,” Marche said of Johnson. “You have a guy who has literally defiled the symbols of democracy trying to become part of democracy. It’s a sort of inherent contradiction that’s extremely, extremely dangerous.”
Johnson is a creature of a memeified and Trumpified politics and a candidate who takes a sorry/not sorry approach to his campaign. He is flippant, relishes heckling Democrats and embraces his role as clown prince of Jan. 6. Online, he sprinkles weighty issues with trolling and a Make America Great Again fervor. In person, he’s gregarious and quick to crack the smile that ricocheted across the internet five years ago.
Alternately called the Lectern Guy and, less precisely, the Podium Guy, Johnson launched his campaign for a low-profile local position on Jan. 6, five years after he became a symbol of the calamity that engulfed the Capitol. His run for office challenges voters to confront a paradox and decide whether they believe that someone who joined a movement to upend a democracy can now try to help lead one.
Waving for the camera
Johnson, 41, with red hair draped over his shoulders, promotes his run for office online and in podcast appearances, but his real-world campaign efforts often appear meager. He stopped by a recent neighborhood meeting about a planned development but left half an hour after it began. Another candidate stayed to chat with voters.
A would-be campaign event at a doughnut shop last month consisted of him posing for a selfie, ordering two dozen doughnuts and not much else.
“You don’t often say that to a guy, but you’ve got great hair,” the woman at the counter told Johnson as he placed his order. He didn’t mention his campaign.
Politics is new for Johnson. He voted in 2004 but didn’t cast a ballot again until 2020, according to Manatee County records. He has long distrusted politicians, he said, but Trump intrigued him because the reality star and real estate magnate came from outside the political class and spoke bluntly.
Johnson had never been to a political rally but decided to go to Washington when Trump promised a “wild” event at the Ellipse to challenge his 2020 loss. Johnson’s wife, mother and grandmother urged him not to go, but he was determined. Plane tickets were hard to find, and he had to take a three-legged flight to get there.
When the speeches were over, Johnson marched toward the Capitol and broke into a sprint when he heard it had been breached. The crowd faced off with the police. Johnson got a taste of tear gas and filmed a rioter taking a baton from a cop.
He headed into the Capitol for the first time in his life and marveled at its beauty, he said. He asked a stranger to take a photo of him posing next to a sign saying the area was closed to tours. He posted the picture to Facebook and headed toward Pelosi’s office. He jiggled the door handle but found it was locked. He saw her lectern in a hallway and thought it would make a great photo prop. When a news photographer saw him carrying it, Johnson raised his hand.
“I’m a polite guy,” Johnson said years later, “and if someone’s taking your photo, you smile, you wave.”
He planted the lectern in the Rotunda, gave a short satirical speech calling for new rules for Congress and wandered toward a crowd that was talking about breaking into the House chamber. Johnson told a bystander that a nearby bust of George Washington would make a good battering ram. No one took up the idea.
The situation was escalating, so Johnson decided to leave, he said. The photo of him rocketed around social media, and Johnson afterward texted friends and family members saying he “broke the internet” and was “finally famous.”
His friends laughed at first. Then they saw what others were doing at the Capitol and learned Johnson and his family were facing threats.
“It went from ha ha to uh-oh,” said his friend Sonny Parlin, who checked on Johnson’s wife and sons as they vacated their house that night.
In Washington, Johnson returned to his hotel, turned on CNN and heard the word “insurrection.” He cut his trip short and drove home in a rented SUV. Two days after the riot, he was arrested.
Life became difficult for Johnson and his family, he said. Friends stopped talking to him. He racked up $100,000 in legal bills. He started drinking every night and sipped Scotch throughout his virtual plea hearing to take the edge off the day, he said. The facility where his wife works as a doctor was bombarded with negative reviews. Suzi Johnson, who declined an interview request through Johnson, stuck by her husband, complaining on Facebook in 2024 that the government and the mainstream media had “tried to destroy my life over this.”
Initially charged with theft, Johnson accepted a plea deal for trespassing to avoid a years-long prison sentence even though he didn’t think he had done much wrong, he said. That’s a common sentiment among those charged with minor offenses at the Capitol, said Michael Romano, who helped oversee Jan. 6 prosecutions at the Justice Department.
People who flooded into the Capitol on Jan. 6 should have known they weren’t allowed to be there because they saw others attack cops and break into the building, Romano said. Many of them acted peacefully, he said, but their presence made clearing the Capitol much more difficult because officers didn’t know who in the mob might turn violent.
“Somebody who participated in January 6th shouldn’t be in office, period,” said Romano, who is now in private practice. “And I think that somebody who is willing to say one thing to the court under oath and then turn around and disavow that shouldn’t be in office.”
Using Jan. 6 as ‘free marketing’
The photo of Johnson carrying the lectern has become one of the enduring images of Jan. 6, along with those featuring the shirtless, face-painted QAnon Shaman and a man who propped his feet on Pelosi’s desk. The internet soon dubbed Johnson the Podium Guy, even though the piece of furniture he had posed with was technically a lectern.
He is a stay-at-home dad to five boys ages 10 to 19. He’s a purple belt in jujitsu. He likes to cook for his family and do carpentry in his garage. He says he’s committed to giving back to his community.
“I want my legacy to be more than one day,” he said.
But that one day figures prominently in his public persona — and offers “free marketing” for his run for office, he says. Johnson’s campaign logo is a silhouette of him carrying the lectern. He titled his book “Taking a Stand” (get it?) and for a time operated an X account under the name of Frederick Muhlenberg, the first speaker of the House. The banner on his Facebook page features a Lego rendition of Johnson on Jan. 6.
His willingness to make a joke of anything, including himself, makes him easy to get along with, said Parlin, his friend and jujitsu instructor.
“He becomes the mayor wherever he goes,” he said. “You can’t not like the guy.”
Johnson supplements the family income with $400 or more a month from payments from X for his frequent posts from his @lecternleader account, he said. As a part-time influencer, he goes to gun shows, attends events like libertarian icon Ron Paul’s 90th birthday party and hangs out with figures on the right who go by names like Brick Suit and the AK Guy.
During a visit to Washington this month, he posed outside Pelosi’s office wearing a sweatshirt that featured a likeness of him taking her lectern. A Pelosi spokesman called the stop at her office a “cheap political sideshow” and plea for attention. In another recent post, Johnson joked about walking away with the recently installed plaque at the Capitol that honors the police officers who protected the building on Jan. 6. And he boasted in another post of sending bacon to a refugee center in Dearborn, Michigan, which has a large Muslim population.
“I get bored pretty quickly, so sometimes you do some of the rage-baiting stuff,” he said.
He’s not the only candidate using Jan. 6 as a political launchpad. In Oregon, David Medina, who was charged with obstructing an official proceeding and later pardoned, is running for governor. In South Carolina, Tyler Dykes, who was convicted of assaulting law enforcement and then pardoned, is running for governor. Medina and Dykes did not respond to requests for comment.
He’s not the only candidate using Jan. 6 as a political launchpad. In Oregon, David Medina, who was charged with obstructing an official proceeding and later pardoned, is running for governor. In South Carolina, Tyler Dykes, who was convicted of assaulting law enforcement and then pardoned, is running for a House seat. Medina and Dykes did not respond to requests for comment.
Johnson initially launched a campaign for an at-large seat on the county commission. In February, the commissioner for his district died, and now Johnson is running for her seat. The primary is in August and the general election in November.
Despite the lectern gags and Pelosi trolls, Johnson says he cares deeply about local issues like improving traffic and slowing development. He says he wants to imbue county government with MAGA values, find budget cuts and ensure that growth benefits residents instead of developers.
Local Democrats are not impressed. “Manatee County needs serious people who address the serious problems that we have in our community,” said Christine Kennedy Meier, chair of the Manatee County Democratic Party.
But some voters in the Republican-dominated county like Johnson’s message. Chris Bennett, a local police officer who describes himself as a Christian conservative, said he thinks those who attacked cops on Jan. 6 acted despicably but doesn’t believe Johnson should have faced charges.
“It’s too unaffordable to live here, and Adam, the things that he speaks on are things that us natives to this area are concerned about,” Bennett said.
Cynthia Keogh, a Republican who lives in Parrish and works in accounts payable, said she’s still learning about the candidates but cares about curbing local development, not Jan. 6.
“There was a lot of showboating in that picture, unfortunately,” Keogh said of the viral photo of Johnson. “But that doesn’t say who he is and how people react to him when they meet him.”
From a ‘stupid idea’ to a ‘good day’
At his sentencing hearing four years ago, Johnson told the judge that taking the lectern was a “stupid idea” and said he was ashamed to have been part of Jan. 6. Since then, he’s described the day differently, saying all he did was take a “private tour” of the Capitol.
“It was a good day,” he said on a recent episode of the “Drinkin’ Bros” comedy podcast. “Look, the fallout was awful, but it was a good day. People actually showed up and said, ‘Enough is enough.’”
He embraced that sentiment in interviews with The Washington Post, saying he didn’t realize he was trespassing and calling the theft charge against him ridiculous.
“I moved furniture,” he said. “I didn’t steal anything.”
Over the years, the question Johnson has been asked more than any other is whether he would do it again, he said. He didn’t directly answer, saying he can’t change the past.
But what if he could?
“It’s not the first place I would go in my life and change,” he said.
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