Ex-speaker says Trump ‘abused’ backers’ loyalty
MARCO ISLAND, Fla. – Former House Speaker John Boehner no longer watches much cable TV news. Noise, he calls it.
It was only when aide John Criscuolo texted him a tweet with some raw video attached – “Trump supporters going at it with the police on the steps of the Capitol,” it read – that he learned the Congress in which he had served for a quarter-century was under siege by a mob.
A mob whose members said they were encouraged by a president from his own party, and one he had sometimes advised.
The insurrection Jan. 6 was a shock but not exactly a surprise, the violent culmination of a decade that landed the GOP in a place Boehner dubs “crazy town”: The rise of the disruptive tea party and the Freedom Caucus. The power of incendiary TV and radio talk show hosts who make media heroes of the political fringe. And the election of the even more disruptive Donald Trump as president.
Boehner’s new book, being published Tuesday by St. Martin’s Press, is titled “On the House: A Washington Memoir.” It is unlike the classic Washington memoir, those soft-focus accounts extolling what-iachieved in office. “I wasn’t going to write some typical Washington walk,” he told USA TODAY.
In the book, he describes Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as “Lucifer in the flesh.” Freedom Caucus members as “political terrorists” and “far-right knuckleheads.” Former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin as “one of the chief crazies.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell as smart and strategic but someone who “holds his feelings, thoughts, and emotions in a lockbox closed so tightly that whenever one of them seeps out, bystanders are struck silent.”
And those are just his fellow Republicans.
It is an extraordinary rebuke of the current-day GOP, an excoriation without precedent in modern times, leveled by one of the party’s most senior figures. Though Boehner is also critical of Democrats, his prime targets are Republican officials he says are more interested in praise on Fox News than in governing.
In an interview at his condo in this upscale Florida resort town, he accused Trump of “abusing” the loyalty of his followers by lying to them about the presidential election he lost, rhetoric that fueled the storming of the Capitol.
His book brought a derisive retort from Trump spokesman Jason Miller, who suggested in a statement that Boehner drank too much, hadn’t been an effective leader and wasn’t committed to conservative values. Miller told The New York Times that Boehner was a “Swamp Creature.”
Some Democrats who agree with Boehner questioned why he didn’t do more to decry those forces when he was in a better position to do something about them.
“You invited in the crazies and gave them a big bear-hug,” David Corn wrote last week in the liberal magazine Mother Jones. “You set them on a path that not so surprisingly ended up with a Republican president inciting a Republican crowd to ransack the citadel of American democracy where you once worked. So spare us your righteous indignation.”