Trump endorses Mike Johnson for Speaker of the House
By Josh Christenson and Ryan King, New York Post – December 30, 2024
President-elect Donald Trump endorsed Mike Johnson for House speaker on Monday following a fight over government funding earlier this month that divided Republicans and imperiled his leadership bid.
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.
Trump’s endorsement of Johnson was a strategic calculation intended to prevent him from getting stymied by a House GOP civil war early on in his next administration, one source close to the president-elect told Semafor.
“He can bury [Johnson] whenever he wants,” that source said. “Get through Jan. 20, get rolling on the border, rack up some wins, and then use the bully pulpit in full force from there on out.”
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.”
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.
Musk, who demonstrated his clout in the lower chamber earlier this month, later suggested he was iffy on Johnson, telling Massie on X, “You might be right, but let’s see how it goes.”
Following Trump’s endorsement of Johnson, Gaetz proclaimed that “the resistance to @SpeakerJohnson is now futile.”
“Let’s work to make him the best version of himself (which was more like the 2023 vintage of Mike),” he wrote on X.
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.
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 Sunday.
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, 2025 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.
Debt limit showdowns are particularly dicey affairs because of the potential to cause the U.S. to default on its debt.
The negotiated deal featured some modest attempts at reining in spending, including caps on discretionary spending, a clawback of unused COVID-19 funds, work requirements on food stamps and more.
Government deficits increased beyond what had generally been expected in the deal, in part due to supplemental foreign aid that later came up.
“There was no reason to do it—NOTHING WAS GAINED, and we got nothing for it—A major reason why that Speakership was lost. It was Biden’s problem, not ours. Now it becomes ours,” Trump ventured on Truth Social Sunday.
“I call it ‘1929’ because the Democrats don’t care what our Country may be forced into. In fact, they would prefer ‘Depression’ as long as it hurt the Republican Party.”
Trump is inheriting a fiscal storm in his first year in office, with a debt limit fight, multiple government funding battles, the expiration of the 2017 tax cuts, the expiration of an expansion of Affordable Care Act subsidies, and more on the horizon.
All of that threatens to suck up critical time that Trump and Republicans will need to get through their legislative agenda on key issues such as the border and energy policy.
Moreover, Republicans are particularly divided on how to handle the debt ceiling and government funding situations.
When Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance intervened in the government funding fight earlier this month and demanded the GOP address the debt ceiling, over three dozen House Republicans openly defied them and voted down the package they favored, forcing leadership to play ball with Democrats.
That showcased some of the limitations of Trump’s pull within the notoriously recalcitrant House Republican conference.
Republicans supposedly made a handshake deal to tackle the debt limit later on and slash spending by about $2.5 trillion over a decade during the latest government funding row.
Some Democrats have privately expressed interest in Trump’s desire to eliminate the debt limit outright—keen on taking a tool away that Republicans have used to vex them in the past.
One thing Democrats have publicly soured on doing is bailing out Johnson if he fails to whip up the votes needed to lock down the gavel.
They bailed him out in May over a motion to oust him in response to his decision to take up a vote to replenish aid to war-torn Ukraine.