Johnson meets Trump in Fla. while House swirls in turmoil
PALM BEACH, Fla. — Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson met privately Friday at the ex-president’s Mar-a-Lago club, a rite of passage for the embattled House leader as he positions himself, and his GOP majority, side-by-side with the indicted Republican Party leader ahead of the November election.
The two planned a joint announcement on election integrity that gives voice to unfounded conspiracy theories, but the trip itself is significant for both. Johnson needs Trump to temper hard-line Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s threats to evict him from office. And Trump benefits from the imprimatur of official Washington dashing to Florida to embrace his comeback bid for the White House and his tangled election lies.
“It is the symbolism,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative commentator and frequent Trump critic.
“There was a time when the Speaker of the House of Representatives was a dominant figure in American politics,” he said. “Look where we are now, where he comes hat in hand to Mar-a-Lago.”
The trip showed the fragility of the speaker’s grip on the gavel, just six months on the job, but also his evolving grasp of the politics of the Trump era as the Republicans in Congress align with the “Make America Great Again” movement powering the former president’s reelection bid.
Trump and Johnson were said to discuss a topic both have embraced as a priority campaign strategy: pummeling President Joe Biden with alarmist language over what Republicans claim is a “migrant invasion.”
By linking the surge of migrants coming to the U.S. with the upcoming election, Trump and Johnson want to prevent noncitizens from voting — even though it’s already a federal felony for a noncitizen to cast a ballot in a federal election.
In a background paper sent ahead of the meeting, they echoed language from the racist great replacement conspiracy theory to suggest that Biden and
Democrats are engaging in what Trump’s campaign called “a willful and brazen attempt to import millions of new voters.”
Johnson proposed the idea of coming to Mar-aLago weeks before Greene filed her motion to vacate him from the speaker’s office.
The speaker’s own political livelihood depends on support — or at least not opposition — from the “Make America Great Again” Republicans who are aligned with Trump but creating much of the House dysfunction that has ground work to a halt.
Trump urged Republicans to “kill” a national security surveillance bill that Johnson had personally worked to pass, contributing to a sudden defeat that sent the House spiraling this week into crisis.
The legislation was approved Friday in a doover but only after Johnson provided his own vote — a rarity for speakers, who rarely vote in the chamber — before he departed for Florida.
“I can’t imagine President Trump being very happy about that,” Greene said.