The Stunning Hypocrisy of Mike Johnson

Our "fundamentalist Christian" House Speaker, who once declared that he and his son monitor each other's porn intake, is in New York to publicly defend a man who cheated on his wife with a porn star.

Welcome to a special daytime edition of Nightcap, necessitated by the news of the morning.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a fundamentalist Christian Republican from Louisiana, flew up to New York Tuesday morning to defend Donald Trump in his criminal trial over hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. In a press conference outside the courtroom, Johnson publicly attacked the “partisan Democrat District Attorney” who brought the charges, the “Biden-donor judge” (who gave a grand total of $15 to the Biden campaign in 2020), and star witness Michael Cohen, who was Trump’s fixer during the 2016 campaign. 

“This is a man who is clearly on a mission for personal revenge and who is widely known as a witness who has trouble with the truth,” Johnson said of Cohen. “He is someone who has a history of perjury and is well known for it. No one should believe a word he says today.” 

Let’s do a quick refresher on Mike Johnson here to try and unpack the many layers of irony and hypocrisy at play. Speaker Johnson, whom House Republicans installed as their leader after 14 failed votes to replace former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), has said he bases his entire worldview around the Bible and flies a Christian nationalist flag outside his office on Capitol Hill. Prior to joining Congress, Johnson spent years fighting against gay rights as an attorney for the Alliance Defense Fund, has described gay people as “sinful” and “destructive,” and has argued for criminalizing gay sex. He claims abortion is causing an “American Holocaust” and once proudly announced that he and his son monitor each other’s porn intake via an app called Covenant Eyes. 

Now, this self-declared prophet has popped up to New York to publicly defend Donald Trump, a man found civilly liable for rape who cheated on his wife with a porn star, paid hush money to silence her during his campaign, and then allegedly falsified business records to cover it all up. Of course, the effort to defend Trump relies heavily on smearing Michael Cohen, who’s admitted to arranging the hush money payments, as a “witness who has trouble with the truth.” You’ll note that at no point did Johnson use his pulpit to say that Trump didn’t actually do what he’s accused of doing, nor did Johnson note that Trump, himself, is such an egregious liar that he literally altered a hurricane map with a sharpie pen to support his false claim that Hurricane Dorian was heading into Alabama when it wasn’t. The Washington Post’s fact-checker found in 2021 that “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years”—and he’s since claimed he has no idea who his rape accuser, E. Jean Carroll, even is, despite the existence of a photo of them hanging out together. So it’s hard to bring up Michael Cohen’s history of lying without calling attention to the defendant’s own troubled relationship with truth, but I digress.

Johnson’s special trip to the Big Apple to clean up for Trump came the day after Cohen testified that he’d used $130,000 of his own money to silence two women Trump had had extramarital affairs with and that Trump had promised to pay him back. He said Trump told him at the time to “just get past the election, because if I win, it will have no relevance because I’ll be president, and if I lose, no one will care.” 

Cohen testified that when he asked Trump if he was worried about Melania finding out about the cheating, Trump said, “Don’t worry…How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long.” 

Cohen of course does have a history of dishonesty, and it’s likely that the jury will be heavily relying on his testimony to convict Trump. Despite being a glaring hypocrite, Johnson is actually a smart man who knows that discrediting Cohen is Trump’s only hope of winning the case. And Trump has been slapped with multiple gag orders that are threatening to put him in Rikers, at this point, so someone’s gotta do his dirty work for him. It’s just that in doing said work, Johnson has made abundantly clear that none of his supposed Christian values are genuinely held. No one will let him forget this moment when he wields his gavel against abortion and gay rights and porn and whatever else under the guise of moral governing going forward. The only thing Mike Johnson has made clear today in his effort to protect the Republican presidential nominee is that Johnson, himself, is a fraud.