No Wonder Donald Trump Loves Mike Johnson

There were so many chilling moments on Wednesday around the ascension—or, as he himself phrased it, the “raising up” by God—of Rep. Mike Johnson to speaker of the House of Representatives. There was his claim that “I don’t believe there are any coincidences in a matter like this. I believe that Scripture, the Bible, is very clear that God is the one that raises up those in authority.” There was his weird and inscrutable explanation that his wife was not present in the chamber because she was “worn out” from the many weeks she had just spent on her knees in prayer to the Lord. There was his now-infamous taped insistence that the United States is “not a democracy,” having defined democracy as “two wolves and a lamb deciding what is for dinner.” Rather, Johnson insisted, we are a “constitutional republic” set up by the founders based on a “biblical admonition.”

“The founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” Johnson had said, during a September 2022 episode of his conservative Christian podcast, echoing the fabrications of debunked faux-historian David Barton and other religious zealots who have only ever read the parts of the First Amendment, and constitutional history, with which they agree. None of this is historically accurate or even remotely factually true, as David Rothkopf points out here. But for those like Johnson and his former confederates at the Alliance Defending Freedom, where he worked before being elected to Congress, claims that there are broad Christian roots for the founding documents and distortions of the intentions of the Framers are central to the legal and constitutional push for sectarian theocratic ends. Ultimately, if you believe and disseminate one “big lie,” why not believe and press them all?

There is also the fact that Johnson is a zealous homophobe and anti-abortion crusader who has said that physicians who offer abortion care should be “imprisoned at hard labor” and who has co-sponsored federal legislation that would ban abortions after the detection of a fetal heartbeat. In 2015 Johnson told Irin Carmon of New York magazine, “Many women use abortion as a form of birth control.” He has, in speeches, suggested that school shootings are the natural consequence of teaching evolution. He co-sponsored legislation introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene that would make it a crime to provide gender-affirming care to people under 18 years of age. The list goes on and on.

And then there is his role in the legal efforts to set aside the results of the 2020 election, not by harassing and threatening election workers or tampering with voting machines—those are the bumbling efforts with which Donald Trump’s goons (and Rudy Giuliani) were tasked. No, Johnson, who styles himself a “constitutional lawyer,” was, according to a New York Times article from last year, “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” on Jan. 6, 2021. His creative if wholly meritless argument afforded his colleagues a bloodless “third option” to overt “Stop the Steal” violence and idiocy. Instead of falsely blaming their candidate’s defeat on “rigged” voting machines—a claim that has now landed Trump’s low-rent lawyers on probation and has others facing million-dollar defamation lawsuits—Johnson persuaded his colleagues to blame the way key states had altered their voting procedures during COVID-19, bloodlessly insisting that such changes were simply unconstitutional.

The theory is absurd—under a basic legal principle known as laches, it’s impermissible to contest the results of an election you lost simply because you didn’t like the rules, when you could have challenged those same rules before the election was held. But Johnson found a more-than-willing audience for his tricked-out do-over theory in House Republicans, some of whom wouldn’t have condoned a mob attempting a coup but were all in when an attorney led it. As the Times put it of Johnson, “His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.” Eventually, 147 Republicans voted to block the certification of Joe Biden electors. Johnson openly bragged about the way he took the lead in filing with the Supreme Court an amicus brief to set aside the election results. Oddly, when he was questioned about all this vitally important “constitutional lawyering” by the press this week, reporters were jeered at by Republican lawmakers and told to shut up. Election-denialism denialism is evidently a thing now.

But lest you allow yourself to believe that Johnson is a masterful lawyer’s lawyer, he has also been quick to pander to the big lie enthusiasts as well: “In every election in American history, there’s some small element of fraud irregularity,” he said in a 2020 radio interview. “But when you have it on a broad scale, when you have a software system that is used all around the country that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, when you have testimonials of people like this, but in large numbers, it begs to be litigated and investigated.”

There is, in the end, nothing scarier than a MAGA heart that comes dressed as a sober attorney. Jim Jordan looks as if he wants to punch you in the neck with a second’s notice. Mike Johnson will end you with a footnote or case citation. But as the Framers could have warned you, a nation that was dreamed up chiefly by lawyers was almost overdetermined to be run into the ground by them one day. It was de Tocqueville who famously argued, “Scarcely any political question arises in the United States that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” If you are willing to achieve your craziest ends by any means necessary—and the processes and trappings of the law are a means at your disposal—Johnson is the inevitable consequence of that vision. He prides himself on his creative lawyering. In 2020, after then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously ripped up a copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech, Johnson cleverly tried to turn it into a criminal activity: “A lot of people have been talking about this the last 48 hours, and I did a little legal memo to point out to my colleagues that she actually committed a felony when she tore that paper up,” Johnson told Fox News. Team Trump on the sanctity of official documents.

Johnson is thus the terrifying embodiment of two anodyne faces that give cover to the worst forms of MAGA extremism: theocratic zealotry and lawyerly precision. It’s not just that he’s Jim Jordan with better hair. It’s that he is Sen. Mike Lee, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Sen. Josh Hawley, and the people who invent fake gay couples in order to bring wholly hypothetical cases to the Supreme Court. He’s a constitutional lawyer, sure, in the same way that Justice Amy Coney Barrett is: He exists to graft a vanilla-scented, lawyerly sounding vision of a theocratic America onto its secular institutions. He will be far more effective than the nutbars in the House who lead with their id, the Lauren Boeberts and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes, and the parking lot lawyers who did Trump’s bidding, the Sidney Powells and the Jenna Ellises. Even Trump’s TV lawyers won’t have a patch on the guy that doesn’t so much practice law as weaponize it for the causes to which he believes himself anointed by God.

For all the reasons everyone warned us of the high-functioning Donald Trump, be very wary of Mike Johnson. Like former White House counsel Don McGahn, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and the other “lawyer’s lawyers” who evaded the MAGA taint by virtue of looking like scholars in the clown car, the sober constitutional lawyer will do the most grievous harm, all while smiling and telling you it’s lawful.