Inside sources reportedly say Donald Trump has been heard privately joking about just how easily he believes he’s able to puppeteer House Speaker Mike Johnson.
“I’m the speaker and the president,” the MAGA leader is understood to have said, according to the New York Times. Citing two people with knowledge of his remarks, the newspaper further notes that Johnson’s conduct in office over the past several weeks, amid an ongoing shutdown critics fear may eventually prove the longest and most damaging on record, has done little to disabuse Trump of that notion, or anyone else.
Even before Johnson decided to suspend Congress indefinitely from October 1, the Speaker had come under fire from his opponents across the aisle for his perceived obsequiousness to the president, marching in lockstep with Trump’s agenda despite calls to use his office as a vanguard against mounting overreach from the executive branch.
Johnson was instrumental in rallying Republican officials behind the White House’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” spending proposals earlier this year, along with a host of other legislative initiatives on everything from U.S. energy dominance and border security to abortion rights and education reform, all tightly aligned with the MAGA administration’s “America First” agenda.
Since the standoff began earlier this month, the Speaker has only continued along that trajectory, firmly resisting any calls for the House to meet until senior Democrats grant concessions over Republican budgetary measures.
Johnson’s opponents have blasted him for refusing to swear in Adelita Grijalva, a Democratic Congresswoman-elect who would otherwise hold a key vote in a pending House petition to force a floor vote on having the Justice Department release new findings on the Jeffrey Epstein case. Johnson, the official responsible for administering Grijlava’s oath of office, has bizarrely claimed he has no authority to do so.
Though Trump himself has long courted conspiracy theories about the disgraced financier’s sex trafficking crimes, the case has lately become a poison chalice for his administration given renewed scrutiny of his own relationship with the late pedophile.
Instead, Johnson has committed much of his time to media appearances, viciously attacking Trump’s opponents as solely responsible for the shutdown while defending the president’s increasingly erratic and controversial conduct in office.
Over the past week alone, Johnson has backed Trump’s decision to pardon former Congressman and convicted con man George Santos because the MAGA administration, which is presently prosecuting at least three of the president’s longest-standing political nemeses, believes in “redemption.”
He’s also said there’s nothing amiss about a sitting president’s pursuit of $230 million in damages from the Justice Department over previous federal investigations against him, and defended Trump’s widely decried demolition of the White House East Wing because the ballroom set to replace it “is going to be glorious.”
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