Magic Mike

Opinions will differ as to the precise moment that Republican politics lost its power to shock, but we can ballpark it sometime in early 2021. After the head of the party attempted a coup, was spared any consequence for his actions by GOP members in Congress, and then merrily carried on as leader without any real challenge to his authority, anything has seemed possible.

You could imagine any ridiculously inane thing Donald Trump might say, or offer me any scenario of how badly he and his admirers might behave after another defeat this fall, no matter how hair-raising or outlandish, and all I’d do is nod calmly, stroke my chin, and say, “Yeah, seems plausible.” Anything is possible with the Republican Party and so nothing it or its leaders do can truly be shocking.

I thought. Then I watched this clip on Wednesday afternoon of the country’s highest-ranking Republican officeholder and fell out of my chair.

That was only the beginning. Later, Mike Johnson spoke to reporters and sounded downright statesmanlike in his enthusiasm for the Pax Americana.

“I regard myself as a Reagan Republican,” he told CNN. “I understand the concept of maintaining peace through strength.” Isn’t this the same guy whom Trump once called “MAGA Mike Johnson”?

For the first time in three years, I’m shocked.

Partly, I’m shocked at Johnson’s shamelessness. If he truly believed in doing the right thing and accepting the political consequences, he wouldn’t have volunteered to be the Renfield to Trump’s Dracula in the horror movie that American politics became after the last presidential election.

He also wouldn’t have spent his first six months as speaker twiddling his thumbs while Ukraine languished on the battlefield. Everything he said yesterday in justifying his decision to push new military aid to Kyiv has been true since the start of the war, after all, yet that didn’t stop him from repeatedly voting against aid as a backbencher in the House or failing to prioritize a new package once he took the gavel. And when he did finally put a bill on the floor, what he offered was scarcely any different from the much-maligned foreign aid bill that the Senate passed in February. Substantively, there’s no excuse for such a long delay.

But it feels churlish to beat up on him at this moment. He’s an influential Republican doing the right thing despite populists’ demands to the contrary: In 2024, that’s deeply shocking.

And the way Johnson has gone about it is also shocking. Instead of some mealy-mouthed noncommittal explanation for offering a Ukraine bill (“let the House work its will” or somesuch), he’s gone straight at the “America First” nationalists in his conference by defending the aid on the merits. Rep. Matt Gaetz was sufficiently annoyed by the spectacle to have accused Johnson of “abject surrender” on Wednesday—and when Matt Gaetz is annoyed at a Republican speaker, that speaker has reason to worry.

Johnson doesn’t sound worried, though. What’s gotten into him?

The simplest explanation is that Mike Johnson really is a “Reagan Republican” at heart. And as Occam’s answer tells us, the simplest answer is often also the correct one.

Johnson has always “presented” as more of a traditional Republican than a Trumpist diehard. He’s sincerely socially conservative on policy and imperturbable as a matter of persona, the antithesis of his party’s presidential nominee. He also trusts the “deep state” enough to have developed a “different perspective” on warrantless surveillance after intelligence officials briefed him on it. It shouldn’t surprise us that he might have joined the coup plot of 2021 and voted numerous times against Ukraine aid not out of earnest populist conviction but because he saw those as opportunities to get ahead politically. That’s how most professional right-wingers roll these days; they’re all cynically surfing the same sinister tide.

It’s one thing to surf a sinister tide, though, and another to make the waves that propel it. Perhaps being thrust into power awakened Johnson’s Reaganite conscience. If so, that would make him very different from the standard-issue Republican in the age of Trump.

Still, the Occam’s razor explanation is insufficient. It might tell us why Johnson is doing what he’s doing, but not why he’s doing it now rather than six months ago. The answer to that question is a combination of three factors, I think: Trump’s ambivalence about Ukraine, the electoral calendar, and the incandescent hatred most House Republicans have accumulated for the MAGA wing over time.

Trump’s “ambivalence” toward Kyiv isn’t true ambivalence. He bears Ukraine a grudge and, as an ideological matter, doubtless would prefer to see the Western coalition lose a test of wills with Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime. But Trump also places his personal interests above all ideological commitments, as pro-lifers recently found out the hard way. He probably knows that independents are evenly split on whether to provide more aid to Ukraine and he’s surely heard that independents may be more persuadable this year than in recent election cycles.

For all of Trump’s lunacy, his strategic approach to the election is straightforward: Take bold stands on issues where he knows most Americans are with him, like immigration and inflation, and hedge, hedge, hedge on issues where opinion is more divided.

Ukraine is the latter. And so we get wishy-washy communiqués from Truth Social that read like this:

“It is also important to us!” There’s no call there for House Republicans to block the new aid bill, you’ll note, just the usual grumbling that Europe needs to contribute more to the Western alliance—which surely isn’t what America’s anti-anti-Putinists want to hear.

As much as Trump probably wants to see Biden’s military coalition embarrassed, he might reasonably fear that he and his party will be blamed if funding to Ukraine is choked off and Russia prevails before Election Day. He also might see an upside to Ukraine aid advancing in the House insofar as it gives hawkish “Haley conservatives” a reason to put aside their misgivings about him and stick with the party. And no matter how angry populist isolationists might be about the new bill—and at Trump for not doing more to pressure Johnson into dropping it—there’s no risk of them boycotting the election in protest in November. They’re devout Democrat-haters, Trump’s core base. They’ll show up.

From Trump’s perspective, then, what Johnson is doing isn’t all bad. It helps him hedge on Ukraine, and Johnson likely understands that and feels emboldened to press ahead. The fact that His Majesty granted him a friendly audience at Mar-a-Lago last week may have been all the reassurance the speaker needed to proceed.

But even if Trump were mad at Johnson and House Republicans who are planning to support Ukraine aid, so what? What’s he going to do about it? This moment in time is an auspicious one for traditional Republicans to defy populists insofar as it’s too late for them to be primaried for their sins before the next election. MAGA voters can hate Dan Crenshaw and other Reaganite hawks in the conference as much as they like, but the choice before them now is simply whether to reelect a Republican majority in the House next year or hand the chamber over to Democrats.

And the difference between those two majorities is a meaningful one, all blather about “the uniparty” aside. A Republican-controlled House will give Trump 2.0 a free hand on high crimes and misdemeanors, a Democratic-controlled one will not. The more he and other influential populists throw a tantrum over Ukraine aid, the greater the risk it’ll backfire on them by persuading populists to withhold their votes from Republican hawks on the ballot in November, potentially enabling Democrats to flip the House.

Inadvertently empowering the Democratic Party is a MAGA specialty, you know.

As the calendar advances toward Election Day, the pressure on Trumpists to minimize infighting and eschew their usual demagoguery toward traditional Republicans is growing and will continue to grow. Johnson is taking full advantage of that by choosing this moment to move the otherwise politically risky Ukraine bill.

Interestingly, the other wing of the party isn’t feeling the same pressure.

We shouldn’t underestimate raw animus as a spine-stiffener for House conservatives in all this. Johnson himself is too unflappable (and too precariously positioned) to voice his contempt for the MAGA wing of his conference forthrightly, but some of his members haven’t been as restrained. 

Crenshaw, fresh off tangling with Tucker Carlson, this week accused colleagues who oppose the Ukraine bill of wanting Russia to win—and of secretly hoping to be in the House minority next year. Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin got in Gaetz’s face on the House floor on Thursday morning, dared him to file a motion to vacate against Johnson, and accused him of being, er, “tubby.” Some centrist members have called on Johnson to remove obstructionist Republican populists from the Rules Committee.

There’s even been chatter about raising the threshold of members needed to file a motion to vacate in order to prevent hardcore MAGAs like Marjorie Taylor Greene from threatening Johnson going forward. In response, the populist Freedom Caucus has resolved to stand watch in the chamber in shifts to make sure the GOP leadership doesn’t try to sneak something through while they’re not looking. They’re calling their effort the “Floor Action Response Team.”

Yes, really: FART. The distrust among the House’s right flank is now so thick, you can almost smell it.

Some of the antagonism traditional Republicans feel for their Trumpist colleagues derives from their endless attention-seeking antics. (“Matt Gaetz just wants to be on TV,” a disgusted Van Orden complained.) On Wednesday night, for example, shortly after the text of the Ukraine bill was released, Greene offered an amendment that would require all members voting in favor to join the Ukrainian military. That unseriousness is exasperating. But the degree of bad faith involved in the anti-Ukraine effort is also wearing on them, I think. Case in point:

This clip making the rounds of social media on Thursday also raised an eyebrow:

Republicans could have had some movement on border security in February but Mike Johnson killed it—at the behest of Donald Trump Sr., who craves as much immigration chaos as possible before November in order to maximize his chances of victory. Even if Democrats turned around and agreed to pass H.R. 2, the House GOP’s kitchen-sink wishlist on border enforcement, Trump would likely contrive a reason to oppose it in order to keep the problem from being solved before he faces voters on Election Day.

That’s a lot of bad faith.

So when hawkish House Republicans accuse nationalists of pushing “Russian propaganda,” I don’t think they’re being flip or insulting. I think they mean it—and not without reason. It’s unusual to see that degree of moral disgust between colleagues within a conference; if ever you’re tempted to doubt that the GOP is functionally two parties coexisting under one banner, consider this Dan Crenshaw tweet and let your doubts be eased. 

It’s no wonder, then, that Mike Johnson might seize this moment as an opportunity to push hard on Ukraine aid. Republican hawks are suddenly in the mood for a fight with the MAGAs; the political repercussions of joining hands with the other party to help Kyiv and quash an uprising against the speaker has probably never worried them less.

There’s one more mystery in all this, though. Why is Johnson choosing the most antagonistic procedure available to him to pass the Ukraine bill instead of the least antagonistic one?

The speaker has been moving controversial legislation over the past few months via a process known as “suspension of the rules.” Instead of getting the Rules Committee’s sign-off on a bill and passing it with a simple majority of the House, which is normal, Johnson has been bypassing the committee and passing major bills with a two-thirds majority, as “suspension” requires.

He’s not doing that for fun. He’s doing it because the Rules Committee includes staunch ideologues like Thomas Massie and Chip Roy who won’t always advance bills that they oppose, even if they know that many Republicans and a heavy majority of the overall House support them. Which is an … interesting view of how a democratic lawmaking body should work.

Johnson could have gone the “suspension” route with Ukraine aid. It would have antagonized the MAGA bloc, as he’d once again be bypassing the committee and relying on Democrats to help him pass a questionable bill. But it wouldn’t have been unusual in light of recent practice.

Instead, the speaker insisted on following “regular order” for the Ukraine legislation and moved the bill through the Rules Committee. Presumably, he feared that he wouldn’t have two-thirds of the House in favor if he used “suspension,” causing the bill to fail. Regardless, “regular order” in this case turns out to be anything but regular: As I write this, the Rules Committee looks poised to advance the bill by having Democrats join with pro-Ukraine Republicans over objections from the likes of Massie and Roy.

Which is all but unheard of.

Members of that committee from the minority party never support a rule favored by the speaker if the rule would otherwise fail without their support. Johnson would be breaking new ground if it happens, extending the power Democrats have acquired over legislation under “suspension” to the Rules Committee itself. It would be a thumb in the eye to populist Republicans, who saw their representation on the panel as essential leverage to prevent “uniparty” legislation from advancing.

Why would Johnson do things that way, angering the MAGAs, when Ukraine hawks could have used a discharge petition to pass an aid bill instead?

A discharge petition allows 218 members of the House to force a vote on legislation over the majority party’s objection. Normally the speaker decides which bills reach the House floor, but if 212 Democrats can find six pro-Ukraine Republicans willing to sign their names to a petition, they can bring Ukraine aid to a vote. Which, one would think, would be an ideal outcome for Mike Johnson, as the bill would end up passing and the MAGA bloc wouldn’t be able to blame him for it. It’ll be Democrats—and those six Republican “traitors”—who’ll be responsible.

Some GOP hawks were warming to the idea of a discharge petition before Johnson made his shocking statements on Wednesday in support of the bill. Why didn’t he just stand aside and let them take the matter out of his hands?

I think lobbyist Liam Donovan is right. Doing it that way would have come off as too “cute.”

Johnson would have looked terribly weak if he had washed his hands of all this and deferred to a discharge petition. Conservative hawks in his conference would have resented him for not showing leadership, especially considering that discharge petitions take time to “ripen” procedurally, further delaying Ukraine aid. Populist doves might have resented him too: Instead of crediting him for not moving a bill himself, they probably would have accused him of privately encouraging the hawks to do his dirty work for him by signing the petition.

Both factions would have viewed him as timid and unrespectable. As would pro-Ukraine Democrats, of course—in which case they might not have been willing to come to Johnson’s rescue if and when populists like Greene and Gaetz inevitably file a motion to oust him as speaker.

Johnson opted to show leadership instead, perhaps because he felt a duty to do so or perhaps because he concluded it was the least bad option among the many bad ones before him.

Or was it because he feared there might not be six pro-Ukraine Republicans willing to sign a discharge petition after all? Traditional conservatives talk a good game about standing up to populists but they rarely rise to the occasion when their bluff is called. Anyone considering joining a Democratic petition on Ukraine would do so knowing that populist elements of the GOP base would forever consider them bitter enemies and turncoats. That risk might have scared them away from signing in the end, killing the petition and leaving Ukraine bereft.

By taking the lead, Johnson is offering himself as a lightning rod in their place. Nervous hawks can now vote for the bill and rest easy knowing that the speaker himself will take most of the brunt of populists’ rage. That will be very unpleasant for Johnson, but that’s what you sign up for when you accept a leadership position in this God-forsaken party and opt to do the right thing instead of what the mob wants you to do. We could have done worse than him as a speaker, it turns out. And probably will, sooner than we think.