At a crucial juncture, the speaker went from pandering to Trump to managing him and from challenging the Democrats to working with them.
House Speaker Mike Johnson speaks with reporters after a House Republican Conference meeting at the U.S. Capitol, on April 15, 2024. | Francis Chung/POLITICOJonathan Martin is POLITICO’s senior political columnist and politics bureau chief. He’s covered elections in every corner of America and co-authored a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column chronicles the inside conversations and major trends shaping U.S. politics.
It may seem hard to square the congressman who, only in September, opposed $300 million in Ukraine aid with the one who put his career on the line to deliver $61 billion to the battered country. Following the vote Saturday, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Johnson’s fellow Louisianan, told me the U.S. was “standing up to the evil actors around the world, there’s an axis of evil right now between Russia, Iran and China.”
Yet the events of the last week demonstrate that even in the House GOP there exists the same down-the-middle bifurcation as divided Senate Republicans when they voted on this package in February. For all the recent talk about a de facto coalition government between the two parties in the House, there’s effectively two partiesOne-hundred and twelve House Republicans opposed the Ukraine funding while 103 supported the measure.
Trump was neutralized — to use the term one House Republican wielded from the comfort of background — with the same tactic used to great effect when he was in the Oval Office: overwhelming force. The speaker also played to Trump’s vanity by repeatedly crediting Trump for the tweak in the House bill to make the $9.5 billion in Ukrainian economic aid a forgivable loan rather than a grant.
Trump, in other words, was managed. And it may be a preview of what’s to come, should he win again and, once again, appoint hawkish national security officials who know how to overcome his isolationist instincts. After the vote Saturday, she said of McCarthy: “We could have never gotten here because people didn’t trust whatever he said.”
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