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House Speaker Mike Johnson spent a good portion of his interview on ABC News this weekend engaging in a familiar activity for congressional Republicans: dodging questions about Donald Trump.
George Stephanopoulos questioned the Republican House leader on recent statements made by Trump during his chaotic debate with Kamala Harris — specifically, the fact that he still believes he is the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Johnson treated the question as a hypothetical, one that lawmakers supposedly had no reason to answer: “We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020. I’m not going to engage in it. We’re not talking about that.”
He repeatedly shut down attempts by Stephanopoulos to get him to clearly state whether he believes the 2020 election was won by Biden. Some experts have warned that Trump is already laying the groundwork to level claims about election fraud, should he lose in November.
“I’m not going to play the game,” said the speaker.
House Speaker Johnson tells @GStephanopoulos that he’s not “going to litigate things that happened four years ago” when pressed about former Pres. Trump’s repeated 2020 election denialism.
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) October 6, 2024
“This is a gotcha game that's played, and I'm not playing it.” https://t.co/wJgtAze0B0 pic.twitter.com/M6qnVXNzpT
Johnson’s refusal to answer questions extended to queries about Eric Trump’s onstage rant directly blaming Democrats for supposedly orchestrating the two assassination attempts against his father. The Trump family circle has no evidence to justify those claims, but have made them repeatedly in the wake of a shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania that left the former president wounded and a second attempted shooting at his golf course in Florida.
Even after Stephanopoulos played a clip of Eric Trump making it very clear that he thought Democrats were behind the assassination attempts — “They tried to kill him, they tried to kill him and it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right. They can’t do anything right,” Eric Trump says in that footage — Johnson insisted that he would need to watch the full speech to understand the context of the remarks.
“I don’t think they’re saying that the Democratic Party tried an assassination attempt,” he said. “I think what they’re alluding to is what we’ve all been saying: they have got to turn the rhetoric down.”
Republican members of Congress for years have ran from hallway interviews with reporters around Capitol Hill when questioned about the Trump scandal-of-the-day. Journalists often try to nail down lawmakers on the issue of whether they agree with statements made by the former president, with mixed success.
His behavior during the interview with Stephanopoulos is a sign that Johnson is increasingly engaged in efforts to placate MAGAworld as he approaches the one-year mark of his speakership tenure, a milestone his ill-fated predecessor Kevin McCarthy never reached. Johnson’s ascendance to the role of Republican leader from virtual obscurity, as well as his ability to maintain that position, are both chiefly credited to the rebellion led by eight House Republicans against McCarthy last year, and the fatigue resulting from the messy GOP infighting that followed the speaker’s ouster.
Johnson’s most recent actions in the House tweaked some nerves on the MAGA right. His passage of a resolution to fund the government for several months without a demand for Democrats to pass a GOP messaging bill concocted to combat never-proven claims of widespread non-citizen voting, was seen as a betrayal by some.
Trump lost the 2020 election and spent months trying unsuccessfully to bring cases of election fraud to court, but was roundly dismissed due to a lack of evidence. His supporters later attacked the US Capitol in an effort to prevent the election’s certification.
Johnson was one of dozens of Republican lawmakers in Congress who signed on to lawsuits aimed at halting or overturning the certification of Biden’s election victory in individual states where the GOP complained that pandemic-era changes to mail-in voting procedures violated the law. Those arguments were shot down by courts, as were the Trump campaign’s baseless claims of widespread voter and election fraud.
The House speaker does not play a formal role in the certification of the presidential election. The House does, however, vote on the winner of the presidential election in the event of a tie in the Electoral College, and Johnson could also theoretically organize House members to formally object to the certification of individual states. Such objections would then go to a simple majority vote in the GOP House and the Democrat-controlled Senate.
