Trump, 78, butted heads with Johnson over the speaker’s decision to not suspend the nation’s debt ceiling amid the funding fracas — but still threw his weight behind the Louisiana Republican to win back the gavel in January.
“Speaker Mike Johnson is a good, hard working, religious man,” the incoming president posted on Truth Social. “He will do the right thing, and we will continue to WIN. Mike has my Complete & Total Endorsement. MAGA!!!”
Johnson quickly thanked Trump, adding that he is “honored and humbled by your support.”
“Together, we will quickly deliver on your America First agenda and usher in the new golden age of America. The American people demand and deserve that we waste no time. Let’s get to work!” Johnson wrote on X in response to Trump’s stamp of approval.
The soon-to-be 47th president had hoped to tie federal spending to an elimination of the debt limit, joining with tech billionaire Elon Musk and fiscal hawks in the House Republican conference to tank earlier drafts of the funding bill.
On Dec. 20, Congress passed a slimmed-down version of the legislation that excluded the debt ceiling, while still cutting other costly items — including a 4% pay hike for lawmakers.
In his post, Trump also knocked Democrats for the “very expensive” campaigns of their nominees President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and said the pair’s administration had been a “sinking ship.”
“IT WAS A DISASTER!!!” he declared. “LETS NOT BLOW THIS GREAT OPPORTUNITY WHICH WE HAVE BEEN GIVEN.”
Trump’s stamp of approval on Johnson’s speakership bid comes before what is widely expected to be a brutal contest for the gavel on Jan. 3, 2025.
Republicans had won a four-seat majority, however, with former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) set to ditch his seat, Johnson will have little room for error. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) already revealed that the speaker did not have his support and others like Reps. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) have said they’re on the fence.
Spartz, who has threatened to boycott congressional committees and refrain from participating in House GOP caucus meetings, laid out her demands for Johnson on Monday.“If we are serious about governing, our next SPEAKER must COMMIT PUBLICLY to create at least temporary structures in the House for: 1) authorizations; 2) reconciliation offset policies, and 3) spending audits,” she said in a statement.“We also need to engage competent, unbiased ‘non-swamp’ professionals to help us to at least start getting us gradually out of this serious fiscal mess.”
A potentially protracted delay in anointing the next speaker could pose complications for the certification of Trump’s election victory three days later on Jan. 6, 2025. This is because the lower chamber is not really supposed to do anything other than vote on a speaker when it doesn’t have one.
Johnson has spent ample time with Trump, huddling with him at Mar-a-Lago and attending UFC outings.
A potentially protracted delay in anointing the next speaker could pose complications for the certification of Trump’s election victory three days later on Jan. 6, 2025. This is because the lower chamber is not really supposed to do anything other than vote on a speaker when it doesn’t have one.
One day before Trump endorsed Johnson, the president-elect trashed the Louisianian’s predecessor, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who was toppled in a mutiny following a nasty spending flap.
Without mentioning McCarthy by name, Trump described him as a “good man” but ripped into the debt limit deal he helped broker last year.
“The extension of the Debt Ceiling by a previous Speaker of the House, a good man and a friend of mine, from this past September of the Biden Administration, to June of the Trump Administration, will go down as one of the dumbest political decisions made in years,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Sundary.
Technically, the bipartisan compromise that McCarthy helped negotiate — the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 — suspended the limit on the nation’s borrowing authority until Jan. 1, 2025.
Due to the various complexities of government financing, including a very slight reduction in the debt next month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced the department will begin undergoing “extraordinary measures” between Jan. 14–23, 2015 to help prolong the deadline to address the debt ceiling.
Trump’s team appears to believe those measures will run out by June, giving him just shy of six months to deal with a nasty debt limit fight at a time when he will be hotly pursuing marquee legislation.
Amid heavy pressure from fiscal hawks, McCarthy had gotten into a showdown with the Biden administration on the debt limit in 2023.