Mike Johnson, the First Proudly Trumpian Speaker

Johnson seldom wastes an opportunity to flatter a Republican colleague. He told me that Tom McClintock, of California, a relatively little-known congressman whom Johnson trounced in the race to lead the Republican Study Committee, was a personal “hero.” While speaking with Representative Jim Jordan, of Ohio, on a podcast, Johnson compared their relationship to Batman and Robin, casting himself in the role of the Boy Wonder. He used the term “brother” to describe Jordan, Scalise, and several other House Republicans; former Representative Liz Cheney, now Johnson’s fiercest critic, had been “a sister.” Whenever he’s asked in interviews about Republican critics, Johnson invariably refers to each one as “a dear colleague” and “one of my closest friends.”

If this sounds performative, Johnson, as a high-school student in Shreveport, was almost as enthusiastic about theatre as he was about politics. One former classmate, Stacey Hargon, told me that Johnson’s mother didn’t believe it when he won the Speakership. She told Hargon, “I felt like I was going to wake up and find out it was just another play that Mike was in.” In Johnson’s senior year, in 1990, as the comic master of ceremonies at a school talent show, he put on a captain’s hat and pretended to paddle a boat across a stage as loudspeakers played Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” (“Sail away, sail away, sail away!”). He now often exercises his thespian talents with uncanny imitations of Biden, Trump, and others. He once impersonated the former President on a phone call, convincing his daughter and her friends that Trump was wishing her a happy birthday. After Johnson became Speaker, he amused a visiting friend from Louisiana by imitating McConnell, who’d marvelled at Johnson’s swift ascent. “It took me twenty-two years,” he croaked, as McConnell. (Sitting behind Biden during the State of the Union address this month, Johnson responded in impatient pantomime, stealing attention from the President and reinforcing his bona fides on the right. The conservative Times columnist Bret Stephens compared the reactions on Johnson’s face to “the expressions of a constipated turtle.”)

Although Johnson has branded himself a hard-liner, he has allowed some ambiguity about precisely where he stands. After less than two years in the Louisiana House, he was tapped to run for Congress by Representative John Fleming, who was stepping down to run for Senate in 2016 and wanted a like-minded successor. Fleming never formally endorsed any candidate, but Johnson freely shared with district residents that he’d reluctantly entered the race at the request of their congressman. Fleming told me, “He sort of established that I had endorsed him without me having to endorse him, which I thought was smart.”

Fleming had recently co-founded the House Freedom Caucus, which saw itself as a fiercely conservative counterweight to pragmatists in the Party. Convinced that moderate G.O.P. leaders had packed the Republican Study Committee with loyalists to soften its right-wing bent, the Freedom Caucus’s founders made it invitation-only, to hold the line against compromise. (Former Speaker John Boehner called the group’s members “legislative terrorists” for blocking routine procedural measures in order to extort demands from the Party’s leaders.) A political action committee linked to the Freedom Caucus was one of the top donors to Johnson’s first campaign, and he attended almost all of the group’s meetings during his first few terms in Congress.

Yet Fleming told me that he wasn’t sure if Johnson had formally joined. “He left it pretty vague,” Fleming said. “Only he could tell you.” Johnson, in fact, never became a member, focussing his energies on the more mainstream Republican Study Committee. Now Johnson, as Speaker, has sometimes found his own efforts stymied by the obstinacy of his Freedom Caucus friends, and he told me that privately he had always disagreed with their obstructionist tactics. “I don’t think it is a great idea to go to the floor and burn down all your colleagues and say they haven’t accomplished anything,” he said. Invoking his legal expertise, he argued that the Freedom Caucus’s trademark refusal to compromise undermined the constitutional purpose of Congress. “I have an intimate knowledge of what the Framers intended,” Johnson said. “And the point of this exercise is that you sit around a table and arm-wrestle to figure it out—to find consensus.”

Remarkably, although several Freedom Caucus members told me that they still consider Johnson an ideological ally, several leaders of the conference’s moderate bloc, the Main Street Caucus, said they felt that he was on their side. Representative Dusty Johnson, of South Dakota, the Caucus’s chairman, described the Speaker to me as “strategic, pragmatic, and practical.”

Johnson is even chummy with some liberals. Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, told me that he considered Johnson “the most extreme theocrat we have in the House of Representatives.” But Raskin also noted that Johnson “has absolutely the best manners of anybody in the Freedom Caucus—there is a real niceness, a sweetness about the guy.” (Representative Pramila Jayapal, of Washington, the chair of the Progressive Caucus, similarly told me that she and Johnson have “a good, friendly relationship, just on a personal level.”)

Liberals like Raskin call Johnson a theocrat in part because he frequently toggles between talking about God and talking about lawmaking in the same conversation. In an October interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, Johnson said that the Bible dictated his policy positions on “any issue under the sun.” He went on, “Pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it—that is my world view.” He frequently emphasizes the “endowed by their Creator” line of the Declaration of Independence. And in talks to church groups Johnson has lamented that America, founded as a Christian nation, has become “post-Christian.” Conservative Christians are thrilled with him. They haven’t heard so much God talk from a prominent politician in decades.

But, if Johnson’s tone is preacherly, he is quick to insist that he means only to encourage Christians to let their faith guide their politics, not to force it on others. “I’m not trying to establish Christianity as the national religion or something,” he said in another Fox News interview. Then he repeated that “our Judeo-Christian heritage is the foundation of our country.”

Johnson, who was born in 1972, a year before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, has often said that his passionate opposition to abortion grew out of his experience as the unplanned child of two teen-agers. Friends tried to persuade his seventeen-year-old mother to “take care of the problem,” Johnson said, on a podcast. “So this is real—it’s personal to me.”

So is politics. I first met Johnson shortly after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, and I asked him what the next steps were for the “pro-life” movement. Johnson told me that the Court’s decision was “a good one” but, to my surprise, immediately changed the subject, to discuss his work coördinating political “messaging” for the G.O.P. conference. He had evidently seen polls showing that talking about abortion restrictions had become a political liability. As Speaker, he has fallen back on the time-tested formulation that “cultural consensus” on abortion must come before federal legislation. “We are a long way from that,” he told me recently. “So it is not on the agenda.”

His views on sexuality hew closely to the teachings of the Southern Baptist Convention, where he served for eight years as a trustee of the denomination’s public-policy arm. He maintains that homosexuality is a disordered behavior, not an identity. In 2003, as an attorney for what is now called the Alliance Defending Freedom—the evangelical equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union—Johnson worked on an amicus brief to the Supreme Court defending the criminalization of gay sex. He later represented Louisiana in legal battles to uphold its ban on same-sex marriage, and declared that allowing gay unions was “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic.” During his time as a Louisiana state lawmaker, from 2015 to 2017, he was best known for introducing a bill to prohibit penalizing religious people for holding the view that marriage should be only between a man and a woman—a measure that critics said would establish a right to discriminate against gay couples. He once unsuccessfully sued the city of New Orleans to try to stop the provision of health benefits to same-sex partners of municipal employees.

But his relationship with L.G.B.T. advocates in his district, around Shreveport, reveals the complicated layers of his character. Whereas some Louisiana Republicans refused to meet such advocates, Johnson welcomed them in. Adrienne Critcher, an activist whose son is gay, told me that Johnson tried to bond with her over his own experiences with bullying in middle school, then e-mailed to thank her for their conversation. “I admire your sincere conviction,” he wrote. “The story about your son being bullied in jr high was heartbreaking and, as I mentioned, something I myself could relate to. No one should have to endure that kind of treatment, and it is a shame that people can be so mean.” They could both agree, he continued, “that we need better understanding and compassion across the board. The only way I know how to accomplish that is through respectful dialogue. I hope we can continue ours in the days ahead. In the meantime, I do not regard you as an opponent, but rather as a fellow leader who is doing what she earnestly believes to be the right and noble thing. I would like to regard you as a friend as well, but I understand that may be pushing my luck.” He added a smiley-face emoticon.

But in the 2016 primary for his congressional district—the only competitive race Johnson has faced—he leaned heavily on his record of opposition to L.G.B.T. rights. The early favorite was Oliver Jenkins, a Shreveport city-council member who’d been a Marine fighter pilot in Iraq. Alan Seabaugh, a Louisiana state senator who is Johnson’s former law partner and managed a pac supporting his campaign, told me that Johnson “had a huge faith network” on his side. “A lot of that was under the radar.” Jenkins, encouraged by the Shreveport Chamber of Commerce, had introduced a city ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and the Johnson campaign raised alarms that it could punish conservative Christians for their beliefs.