Trump’s looming dictatorship is the only real winner in House speaker debacle

The very first thing Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson did after an exhausted House Republican caucus picked him late Tuesday night as their next speaker, ending the three-week fiasco that has shut down Capitol Hill, was to stage a group portrait of modern American fascism.

They crowded onto a small stage — fellow Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the “David Duke without the baggage” who wasn’t conservative enough for today’s GOP; New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, whose congratulatory tweets for this month’s prior, four-hour speaker-elects had played out like Mafia kisses; and Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, the Beetlejuice fan who stayed all the way to the end of this political horror show.

The cruelty seemed the point for the next few minutes as the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives channeled its inner goon squad, shouting down and booing the free press and creating a bullying pulpit to strut and preen for a faraway audience of the only viewer who matters in this former political party turned authoritarian cult: their strongman, Donald Trump.

“We’re not doing any policy tonight,” Johnson — who 14 hours later would be officially anointed the 56th speaker of the House — said at the pep rally that only looked like a news conference. It wasn’t clear if that was his response to the laudably persistent ABC News reporter Rachel Scott, who tried valiantly to press the Louisianan on Ukraine aid and his role in 2020′s Big Lie of election fraud, or his broader mission statement for Republicans in Congress.

The Johnson victory mob let out a chorus of boos and laughed in mocking, bullying tones when ABC’s Scott dared to press the incoming speaker over his prominent role in Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election result. One voice rose above the din — that of North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, 80, whose grandmotherly countenance added shock value to her shrill shrieks toward Scott to “Shut up! … Shut up!” Foxx is chair of the House education committee.

I mourn for America’s schoolchildren while praying that Foxx and her colleagues won’t influence what those students will learn about the importance of a free press.

At least the appalling late-night scene gave the U.S. electorate a real glimpse of what fascism actually looks like close up: dripping contempt for policy, for free and fair elections, and the First Amendment. It also conveyed the power and influence of the man who wasn’t there but whose intimidation loomed over it all: the 45th (and would-be 47th) president.

Even as he sat in (or stormed out of) a Manhattan courtroom this week in the first of his multiple trials for fraud, election interference, and mishandling America’s secrets — and took a $10,000 fine for his blatant intimidation tactics — Trump was the only real winner in the three-week D.C. debacle that left the federal government paralyzed in a time of crisis, both foreign and domestic. His meddling sparked the rise of extreme Christian nationalist, homophobe, and election denier Johnson as Washington’s highest-ranking Republican, now second-in-line for the presidency.

Trump won his own red October through dictatorial domination and humiliation, crushing the speakership hopes of any candidate who’d dared to deviate, even slightly, from the party line that centers on the ex-president’s dangerous falsehood that he was victorious in the 2020 election when, in reality, President Joe Biden got seven million more votes. He won by keeping the media’s gaze on Capitol Hill and away from the GOP’s imploding effort at staging a competitive presidential primary, as well as his deteriorating position in the courtroom.

But mainly, Trump won by successfully cementing the idea that the nation’s Capitol is ungovernable under the weight of constant and unbearable political chaos, thus setting up his 2024 case that only an autocratic strongman — a “Red Caesar” handed dictatorial power to override the stumbling blocks of constitutional democracy — can fix it.

Pulling strings from hundreds of miles away, using the keypad on his mobile phone as his dagger, Trump over the last week has shown the destructive power of his intimidation regime, despite its limitations. The Mar-a-Lago exile might not have the juice to get an ally like his bullying mini-me, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, elected speaker, but it was easy for Trump to unify Capitol Hill Republicans through fear.

Ronald Reagan — a fearsome right-winger in the 1980s who now seems like Abe Lincoln compared with today’s MAGA mess — said famously, “The person who agrees with you 80% of the time is a friend and an ally, not a 20% traitor.” How quaint. In Trump’s GOP, only 99% agreement will have you looking over your shoulder like Leon Trotsky on the run from a Stalinist USSR.

Consider Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer, the GOP majority whip popular enough with his colleagues to become their speaker-designate for a few hours this week. I won’t call him poor Tom Emmer: He’s a garden-variety ultraconservative who not only didn’t denounce Trump’s Big Lie but abetted it, signing on to a frivolous lawsuit aiming to block the transfer of power to Biden. Yet, in our modern People’s Front of Judea, Emmer was enough of an apostate — voting to certify Biden’s election victory and for a gay marriage bill, even (gasp!) expressing sympathy for the family of George Floyd after he was murdered by a police officer in his home state — for Trump to put out a contract on him.

Like all who hope to rise in the MAGA cult that the former Republican Party has become, Emmer made the traditional ring-kissing phone call to the movement’s generalissimo over the week, but Trump — apparently still simmering that Emmer had criticized his attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021 — wasn’t having it. He attacked the Minnesotan on his Truth Social platform as a “Globalist RINO” and even worked the phones with his closest House allies, ensuring Emmer would not get the required 217 votes.

According to Politico, the ex-president boasted to a friend in the Mafia-style that his mentor Roy Cohn had taught him: “He’s done. It’s over. I killed him.” He also posted a text he’s received from a Tennessee congressman: “All candidates now 100 percent trump.”

And so, rising from the ashes of this political pyre is Johnson, a suitable apparatchik whose 100% MAGA approval rating includes his Jan. 6 vote to throw out the Pennsylvania presidential ballots that were cast by me and my friends and family, and whose soft Shreveport accent and nerd-dad big glasses make him a kind of Mr. Rogers of homophobic extremism, a Jim Jordan without the rampaging testosterone.

There is a whole separate column to be written about how Johnson is without question the most dangerous person ever to lead one of the three branches of American government, due to the extremism of his Christian nationalism. The four-term congressman does not believe in our country’s founding principle of separation of church and state. And among the views Johnson would force on the United States would be the total end of women’s reproductive rights and a full undoing of LGBTQ liberation, fueled by his radical views opposing abortion because women need to pump more “able-bodied workers” into the economy and that healthy gay relationships are “a dangerous lifestyle.” Then there’s Johnson’s climate denial, bought and paid for by Louisiana’s Big Oil.

Johnson’s out-of-the-mainstream views are alarming, yet that isn’t the real danger of his speakership. Realistically, Johnson won’t be able to ban gay marriage or abortion, but the unyielding right-wing radicalism of both the new speaker and the rank-and-file members who put him there is a recipe for governmental gridlock, including a possible shutdown in less than three weeks. The only guarantee with Speaker Johnson is more chaos.

And chaos is the ultimate goal, much more so than Johnson’s unattainable theocracy. The utter breakdown of functional governance that seems all but certain under the new speaker is aimed at the masses of less-engaged and less-informed voters likely to grow so sick and tired of the sound and fury that they will clamor for Trump’s promises of authoritarian order. It’s the playbook as written by Trump consigliere Steve Bannon, who encouraged the ouster of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and told associates that ”chaos and destruction” are necessary for his goal of “national rebirth.”

» READ MORE: America needs to talk about the right’s ‘Red Caesar’ plan for U.S. dictatorship | Will Bunch

The looming disaster of Johnson’s speakership will be icing on the melting cake of upheaval — in the Middle East, or Ukraine, or the supermarket checkout — that many voters will blame on Biden even if the real culprits are the likes of Vladimir Putin and a diseased bat in Wuhan. The polls continue to show Trump — despite his indictments and increasingly bizarre behavior on the campaign trail — in a dead heat with Biden, aided by voters who remember 2017-2020 as relatively calm and aren’t focused on Trump’s promises to destroy federal governance, free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or sic the U.S. Justice Department on his enemies.

Those laughing, smirking, mocking white faces that went before the cameras Tuesday night on Capitol Hill provided the team picture for the theocratic minority rule these MAGA Trumpists hope to impose on the rest of us on Jan. 20, 2025. And it might just happen if the silent majority that still believes in democracy listens to Virginia Foxx, and just shuts up.

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