Embattled Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson just demonstrated why GOP voters lose what little faith they place in the people they elect — and it has nothing to do with funding Ukraine without securing the border.
In February 2020, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reacted to former President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech for all the world to see.
As Trump concluded his remarks, and before he left the podium, the San Francisco Democrat, standing right behind the president, dramatically ripped a copy of his speech in half.
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Democrats and their media allies cheered, Republicans called the breach of decorum disgraceful, and Pelosi never apologized.
Instead, “She felt ‘liberated,’” USA Today journalist Susan Page wrote in her 2021 book about Pelosi. “He was shredding the truth, she said, so she would shred his speech.”
Fast forward four years, and we get this from Breitbart News on Tuesday:
“House Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly apologized to President Joe Biden for rolling his eyes at the president’s angry State of the Union address in March.”
During that speech, in between its lies and incoherence, Biden unleashed one of the angriest rants a president has ever targeted at the opposition party.
Writing in Newsweek in March, Paul du Quenoy, president of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute, noted, “Biden is a hyperpartisan, blaming the Republicans—who control neither the presidency nor the Senate nor the Washington bureaucracy—for all of his many problems, from Ukraine to border control to tax policy.”
Read: Kentucky Rep. Massie Faced Fine From Johnson After Video Post Of Democrats Waiving Ukrainian Flags
“In his 67-minute address, reportedly the result of months of intense preparation, Biden was bitter and angry, delivering many of his lines in the loud and cranky tone of a frustrated family patriarch who commands no respect, marshals no enthusiasm, and fears his legacy will spill down a drain of derision,” du Quenoy added. “It was not ‘presidential’ by any stretch. It was hysterical and vulgar, desperate and cheap.”
Johnson certainly would be entitled to more than an eye roll as Biden delivered his angry screed.
Still, he felt the need to tell Biden personally that he was sorry for the incident.
As noted by Real Clear Politics, which first reported Johnson’s mea culpa this week, “This past March, Johnson felt he owed Biden an apology.”
“Seated just over the president’s shoulder during the State of the Union address, the speaker couldn’t mask his expressions of exhaustion and exasperation as Biden laid into Republicans. The two next met on Capitol Hill for the Friends of Ireland luncheon where Johnson toasted Biden as ‘America’s most famous Irishman.’”
Read: U.S. Senate Advances Aid For Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan, And TikTok Bill That Could Ban The App
Johnson pulled Biden aside to “apologize for the eye-roll memes that went around the world.”
Afterward, Biden reportedly laughed and told Johnson he was glad that he was “better behaved” than Pelosi.
Johnson replied, “Well, Mr. President, don’t think my friends back home didn’t want me to light it on fire.”
Yet, as Breitbart put it on Tuesday, “The apology is the latest revelation that suggests Johnson’s sympathies lie with the establishment and Washington, DC, elites, rather than with the voters who elected him to Congress and the Republican conference.”
At least three Republican lawmakers, led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, are advocating for Johnson’s ouster as speaker after he reneged on a promise to force Biden to enhance border security before allowing a vote on aid to Ukraine.
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