Over at USA Today, George Fabe Russell describes House Speaker Mike Johnson’s interview yesterday with George Stephanopoulos:
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Sunday refused to say former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
During a heated interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Johnson also declined to criticize comments from Donald Trump and Eric Trump implying Democrats helped fuel the assassination attempt against the former president in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July.
The Republican nominee held another rally in Butler over the weekend. Eric Trump, the president’s son, said at the campaign stop “They tried to smear us. They came after us. They impeached him twice. And then, guys, they tried to kill him. They tried to kill him, and it’s because the Democratic Party, they can’t do anything right.”
There is no evidence Democratic officials inspired either of the assassination attempts against Donald Trump. Thomas Matthew Crooks, the shooter who attacked Donald Trump’s July rally, injuring the former president and killing one attendee, was a registered Republican who once donated $15 to a liberal group.
Ryan Routh, the suspect in the second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, has been registered as an unaffiliated voter for years. He most recently voted for and donated to the Democratic Party, but there’s no evidence he was influenced by Democratic Party leaders.
Johnson said Sunday that he couldn’t speak to Eric Trump’s comments on the assassination attempt, adding “I don’t know what Eric was saying because I only heard just a snippet there. I don’t know the context.”
Stephanopoulos challenged him, saying, “You just saw it, sir.”
Read the rest here.
Seeing such spinelessness by Johnson allows one to bring out a favorite Churchill quote from his time in the opposition in 1931. It was directed at Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald:
„I remember when I was a child, being taken to the celebrated Barnum’s Circus which contained an exhibition of freaks and monstrosities, but the exhibit on the programme which I most desired to see was the one described as ‚The Boneless Wonder.‘ My parents judged that that spectacle would be too revolting and demoralizing for my youthful eyes, and I have waited fifty years to see the boneless wonder sitting on the Treasury Bench.“