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Mike Johnson: Portrait in Cowardice [1]
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Date: 2025-03-01
The New York Times published an article today on Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s complete 180 turn on the issue of Ukraine aid.
I’ll let some choice excerpts from the article speak for themselves.
The night before Speaker Mike Johnson defied the hard-right wing of his party and brought up a bill to send more than $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, he spent a mostly sleepless night in a luxury hotel suite overlooking the Potomac River, bracing for a mutiny that would end his speakership. “He was in turmoil,” his wife, Kelly Johnson, recalled of that night last spring, in an interview conducted last fall. “We assumed we were done. I was saying, ‘Well, it’s been great. It’s been a nice, but short little ride.’ We thought we were going home.” Mr. Johnson spent the night praying in the living room of their suite at the Pendry. In the morning, he told his wife he was going to do what he thought was right, regardless of the personal political cost. He would move ahead with legislation to continue funding Kyiv’s fight against Russian aggression, telling colleagues that he wanted to be on the right side of history.
Fast forward to today and Johnson is now echoing Trump’s Kremlin-inspired talking points in shameless boot-licking fashion and cheering on a president who, as Susan Glasser writes in the New Yorker, has firmly aligned himself with Russia not only in his pro-Putin stance on Ukraine but also in the Putin-like tactics he is deploying domestically.
Less that one year later, Mr. Johnson still has his job and has made a 180-degree conversion on Ukraine. His reversal reflects a broader Republican capitulation to the president even from some of Congress’s most vocal Russia hawks as Mr. Trump pursues warmer relations with President Vladimir V. Putin, blames Ukraine for the conflict and labels its president — but not Mr. Putin — “a dictator.”
After Friday’s shameful meeting in the Oval Office in which Trump and Vance disgraced the United States with their bullying of President Zelensky, Johnson responded by brown-nosing Trump on social media:
“Thanks to President Trump — the days of America being taken advantage of and disrespected are OVER,” he wrote on social media, adding, “What we witnessed in the Oval Office today was an American President putting America first.”
Of course Johnson tries to rationalize away his about-face, but there’s no concealing what it really is—spineless cowardice.
You can read the whole article for yourself at this gift link.
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