Make Mike Johnson Famous

If Republicans vote for a medieval insurrectionist, and nobody knows, does it count?

(Photo by Paul Morigi/Getty Images for Congressional Integrity Project)

I had hoped, without really expecting, that the 20-plus member GOP rebellion against Jim Jordan’s efforts to shove himself down their throats would bloom into a greater struggle against MAGA Donald Trump’s abusive lieutenants in the House. 

A week later they decided they’d had quite enough integrity, thanks, and settled for Mike Johnson, who’s like Jim Jordan without the manic caterwauling. 

After holding out long enough for onlookers to identify a seemingly insoluble problem—a MAGA rump that would never vote for a non-MAGA speaker, and a mainline bunch who’d never vote for a minority candidate under threat—the latter caved, just as it was dawning on the political elite whom they’d caved to, and the depths of his zealotry.

Perhaps a few of the cavers would claim ignorance, but the big giveaway was that they didn’t want to know. They made the journey from defeating Johnson in conference, to accepting him despite his refusal to drop out after he’d lost, to placing him second in line for the presidency all within the space of about 16 hours, eight of which were for sleeping or coke orgies with Madison Cawthorn. 

And I think it reflects a general sense within the Republican Party that its members can plow past most of their political liabilities with a brief burst of shamelessness and then quickly waft the stench away. They reasoned that by picking a relatively unknown quantity, one who seems studious and kind instead of smarmy and dim (Kevin McCarthy) or abrasive and menacing (Jim Jordan), they could put weeks of turmoil behind them with one quick show of unity, and then let beat sweeteners take care of the rest.

“Johnson has a reputation as a bookish wonk with the sort of policy foundation that hasn’t been seen in a potential GOP speaker since Paul Ryan relinquished the gavel.” Politico gushed.

(Don’t say you weren’t warned!)

Republicans have gambled that they can apply the same method Bill Barr used to bury the Mueller report to Mike Johnson’s record of extremism and insurrection—create a first impression of innocence in the public mind that Democrats can’t easily unmake.

But Barr’s propaganda only worked because Democrats immediately declared defeat, ignoring the fact that the contents of the Mueller report were incredibly damning. (A subsequent bipartisan Senate intelligence committee report was more damning still.) It didn’t stick not because Bill Barr discovered one simple trick to neutralize all corruption scandals, but because Democrats surrendered. 

As Jim Clyburn said, “It’s a chapter that’s closed.” (The next chapter was “health care.”)

I don’t dredge up that history because I think Democrats are necessarily poised to repeat the same mistake.

But I do hope they understand there’s more to typecasting an opposition leader than issuing a few press releases, fanning out some juicy opposition research, and declaring the damage done. Johnson’s record—forget his record, actually; his name, his face, his job title—will not take root in the public imagination on its own. And without a sustained effort to make him famous, he can make himself seem innocuous simply by being a bit more demure than his peers. 

Instilling an idea about a person in the social consciousness and making it stick is an unending and tedious process. Republicans didn’t define Al Gore as a wooden teller of Big Fish tales in one day, it required relentless scoffing; same with John Kerry as the out-of-touch cheese-eating surrender monkey, Hillary Clinton as Mrs. Emails. Nancy Pelosi as Mrs. San Francisco values, and so on. 

House Republicans, with a helpful assist from Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), teed things up nicely for Democrats by boo-hissing and screaming at a journalist to “shut up” for asking Johnson whether he stands by his involvement in the coup, while he stood by meekly. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) shouted booyah (“damn right!” technically) on the House floor in full support of Johnson’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. But memories of those episodes will fade, advertisements that exploit the footage, while useful, will lose shock value. (Don’t most people thumb through their phones during commercial breaks these days anyhow?)

What won’t fade as easily is an indelible caricature. Like Gore the exaggerator again, or Jimmy Carter as the prophet of malaise. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) became a meme when the January 6 Committee released footage of him (daintily, fearfully) fleeing the insurrection he helped inspire. Well here’s Mike Johnson, MAGA Ayatollah, running away from questions about his involvement in the failed coup and support for a national abortion ban.

When Johnson is absent or unavailable for any reason, it must be because he’s hiding from yet more questions about his election lies. Or maybe he’s trying to arrest a gay couple, or a woman who terminated a pregnancy. With him it’s always one or the other. 

I acknowledge that this isn’t the most intellectually satisfying assignment, but it’s really important. 

More than at any point in the modern media era, this kind of crude branding exercise is the direct responsibility of political actors who might prefer to float above the fray and launder their negative politics through journalists. Republicans do this in concert with the political actors at Fox News all the time; Democrats have to carry more of the weight themselves and quite frequently decide the burden is too large. 

The exception that proves the rule is Clarence Thomas, who has become a face of public corruption not because Democrats have battled incessantly to expose him, but because investigative journalists, particularly at ProPublica, have been tenacious in their reporting and have dropped shoe after shoe in a cadence we typically associate with a congressional investigation.

(The latest revelation, that Thomas disguised an expensive gift from a wealthy friend as a loan that he never repaid, does come from a Senate investigation, but not from the Judiciary Committee, which has largely let the Thomas matter drop.)

Without that kind of ratatat the public will pick up on the din of some other concerted messaging campaign. Mike Johnson’s extremism and corruption, along with his unwillingness to defend either, have to become social knowledge, and repetition is central to that process.

After I sent Wednesday’s newsletter, the drivers of the #GenocideJoe hashtag that’s gone viral on the left mobbed my Twitter feed (as I suspected they would), which is mildly annoying, but ultimately just a symptom of how ideas, even wrongheaded ones, take root in modern polities.

The American progressives who’ve become convinced they’re witnessing a Joe Biden-supported genocide didn’t get that idea from “lived experience” or “material reality” or “Democrats endorsing an unpopular activist idea.” They live here in the U.S., the material reality is that Biden does not support genocide and one is not underway, and the Biden policy is to insist on restraint in a horrible war. No, what happened is some fringe leftists made some memes and engaged in giddy slander on their popular podcasts, and that was enough to make it an unquestioned assumption in whole thought communities, including among people who say they voted for Biden once and will never again. Politics didn’t drive the media; the media drove politics.

The same aphorism applies here. House Republicans won’t pay much of a price for electing Johnson unless Johnson is understood, at a population level, to be a malign actor, where when you say the name “Mike Johnson,” it conjures a predictable image in the mind of whomever you’re talking to.

That would require Democrats to change their approach, or at least to change their thinking about what has driven their recent victories. Hakeem Jeffries appeared at a Center for American Progress event this week, and mostly made a good case against Republicans and for Democrats. But he closed with these thoughts: 

“We over-performed in a substantial way in the 2022 election… Every single election denier who was running in a swing state for attorney general or for Secretary of State lost,” he said. “It was a decisive win for a forward-looking way of approaching politics, an affirmation, I think, of the incredible accomplishments to date of President Biden, in terms of what has been done, the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Chips and Science Act…the inflation reduction act.”

The election deniers all lost, it’s true, but what makes him think they were taken down by a wave of national pride in Biden’s accomplishments, instead of by their own toxic corruption? Republicans just lined up unanimously to hand the House over to an election denier. They did this because Donald Trump insisted on it. If they suffer politically as a result, it won’t be because of the IRA. It’ll be because people come to see Johnson no differently than they saw Kari Lake and the other defeated insurrections of the 2022 midterms. And it’s critically important that they do. If Republicans don’t lose next November, an insurrectionist will be running the House on January 6, 2025.