Trump supports embattled House speaker at Mar-a-lago

PALM BEACH, FLA.>> Donald Trump offered a political lifeline Friday to House Speaker Mike Johnson, saying the beleaguered GOP leader is doing a “very good job,” and tamping down the far-right forces led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene trying to oust him from office.

Trump and Johnson appeared side-by-side at the ex-president’s Mar-a-lago club, a rite of passage for the new House leader as he positions himself, and his GOP majority, side by side with the indicted Republican Party leader before the November election.

“I stand with the speaker,” Trump said at an evening news conference at his gilded private club.

Trump said he thinks Johnson, from Louisiana, is “doing a very good job — he’s doing about as good as you’re going to do.”

“We’re getting along very well with the speaker — and I get along very well with Marjorie,” Trump said. But he also called the efforts to oust the speaker “unfortunate,” saying there are “much bigger problems” right now.

The two appeared for a joint announcement on new legislation to require proof of citizenship for voting, but the trip itself is significant for both. Johnson needed Trump to temper hard-line 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 Mara-lago.”

The trip shows 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 discussed 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 before 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 said House Republicans would present new legislation requiring proof of citizenship for elections.

Having the House speaker and the presidential contender align for the campaign season is not in itself surprising or even unexpected. But in the Trump era, the sojourns by Republican leaders to his private club in Palm Beach, Fla., have become defining moments, underscoring the lopsided partnership as the former president commandeers the party in sometimes humiliating displays of power.

Such was the case when Kevin Mccarthy, then the House GOP leader, trekked to Mar-a-lago after having been critical of the defeated president after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. A cheery photo was posted afterward, a sign of their mending relationship.

Johnson proposed the idea of going to Mar-alago weeks before Greene filed her motion to vacate him from the speaker’s office, just as another group of hardliners had ousted Mccarthy. The visit comes just days before the former president’s criminal trial on hush money charges gets underway next week in New York City.

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 are creating much of the House dysfunction that has ground work to a halt.

Johnson commands the narrowest majority in modern times, and a single quip from the former president can derail legislation. He was once a Trump skeptic, but the two men now talk frequently, including earlier this week.

“I think it’s an emerging relationship,” said Rep. Ryan Zinke, R-mont., who served as interior secretary in the Trump administration.