Mike Johnson Stars In 'If You Pretend You Don't See It, Is It Still Evil?'
It’s your Sunday shows rundown!
The Republican Party has always been full of lying, self-righteous hypocrites. A perfect example is House Speaker Mike Johnson. So much so that (slight spoiler) the man can’t even hide that he has a resting smarmy face in every thumbnail for his appearances on the Sunday shows.
So, let’s dive in!
Debt? What Debt?
On CNN’s “State Of The Union,” Jake “You want to buy my book?” Tapper immediately went after him.
Tapper questioned Johnson’s sudden reversal of political rhetoric about debt/spending after the GOP House passed the tax cuts for billionaires/fuck the rest ‘One Big Beautiful Bill.’
TAPPER: I want to play something that you said back in January about the national debt.
(VIDEO CLIP BEGINS)
JOHNSON: The number one threat to our nation right now is our debt. We take that very seriously. Congress has kicked the can down the road for decades, and we're out of road. And so we understand that it's our responsibility to fix this.(VIDEO CLIP ENDS)
TAPPER: So there are five different independent scores of this legislation. Every one of them says that it will increase the deficit somewhere between $3.3 trillion and $4 trillion over the next 10 years. […] you're making the problem worse. You're adding to the debt.
But Johnson’s inability to feel shame is precisely why, as a January 6th insurrection-supporting and 9/11 first responder healthcare-minimizing freak, he was selected to be House Speaker to begin with.
JOHNSON: Well, I think that is dramatically overstated. […] They [Congressional Budget Office, or CBO] don't account for the growth that will be fostered by all the policies that are in this big piece of legislation. […] Just remember the last Trump administration.
Yes, let’s remember the last Trump administration’s economic results. Be it tariffs, manufacturing, deficits, or his general economic stewardship.
Yeah … we are well aware of what Trump did last time, Mike.
Johnson tried the same bullshit on “Fox News Sunday” with Shannon Bream.
JOHNSON: What's really important to point out is that some of the estimates by the CBO are wildly inaccurate.
Are they now? If only there was a way to know why the CBO is seen as the non-partisan arbiter of bill estimate scoring….
Fuck My Constituents
Johnson decided to pair his previous lies with some great examples of evangelicals’ Christian values. On CNN, Johnson tried to say they weren’t cutting Medicaid … only to immediately backtrack and insult his very own home state voters.
JOHNSON: We are not cutting Medicaid in this package […]
TAPPER: 1.4 million people in your home state of Louisiana are on Medicaid. More than 800,000 receive SNAP benefits, also known as food stamps.
Is it your contention that, if any of those Louisianians lose their benefits, it's because they shouldn't have been receiving them, because they were committing waste, fraud or abuse?
JOHNSON: Yes.
Now that’s a Democratic Party midterm ad if we’ve ever seen one.
On CBS’s “Face The Nation,” Johnson doubled down on his constituents being fraudsters to Margaret Brennan.
Particularly the part about helping the poor, even when said people are his own constituents.
BRENNAN: […] nearly 200,000 Louisianans will lose their Medicaid coverage because of this. How do you defend that to your constituents?
JOHNSON: We have not cut Medicaid, and we have not cut SNAP. What we're doing […] is working on fraud, waste and abuse. […] If you are able to work and you refuse to do so, you are defrauding the system. You're cheating the system. […] So there's a — there's a moral component to what we're doing.
Brennan, probably a bit shocked that Johnson was calling his own voters lazy moochers, pushed back.
BRENNAN: […] So the 190,000 Louisianans that are projected […] as losing their Medicaid, your position is, they were just lazy, not working, that they were undocumented? What — what about them? How do you defend that they will be losing their benefits?
But Johnson just kept reiterating his rhetoric while not technically denying what Brennan said.
JOHNSON: No, what we're talking about, again, is able-bodied workers, many of whom are refusing to work because they're gaming the system.
Johnson, who earlier stated that they were not cutting SNAP benefits, then basically admits they are by calling those cuts fraud.
JOHNSON: SNAP, for example, listen to the statistics. In 2024, over $11 billion in SNAP payments were — were erroneous. I mean, that's — that's a number that everyone acknowledges is real. It may be much higher than that. […]
BRENNAN: Louisiana is like the second largest recipient of food stamps in the country, sir.
There might be a reason that “able-bodied workers” are on Medicaid, Mikey, and it’s not their laziness or in error.
That’s right! The Government Accountability Office found that 70 percent of Medicaid/SNAP recipients work full-time, but earn so little they need government assistance so their employers won’t have to pay!
Open Corruption Isn’t Corruption.
We end with Tapper asking Johnson how he squares his previous views on corruption with Trump’s recent crypto-grifto dinner.
TAPPER: You oversaw, as speaker, a congressional investigation into President Biden's ties to his son Hunter's questionable business dealings to enrich him.
You seemed to think it was your responsibility to look into this sort of thing then.
JOHNSON: Yes, Jake, the big, important distinction, the Biden crime family, as they were named, earned that title. […] I mean, again, I don't know anything about that dinner. I do know that President Trump is the most transparent president in the most transparent administration, probably in history. He has nothing to hide
Well, except the guest list of the people who bought access to the president in his “totally not official” personal time with apparently the presidential seal…
… on the other side of a curtain, where he spoke in his official capacity.
All it takes for Johnson not to see corruption is a thin curtain of deniability. Which is on-brand when you remember that this is a man who claims to be such a pious Christian that he pretends not to notice how creepy it is to be porn sobriety pals with his teenage son or make his preteen daughter sign a chastity pledge in a wedding-looking ball.
Have a week.
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JOHNSON: Yes, Jake, the big, important distinction, the Biden crime family, as they were named, earned that title.
Oh, you can take your Biden Crime Family and fuck all the way off out of the Oort cloud you fucking clown.
Every time I see this guy's face, I feel a dense smug roll in