Donald Trump, the former president now on track to be the GOP nominee again in this year’s elections, has recently — again — used rhetoric that some have linked to historical trends seen in authoritarian regimes like the Nazi government in Germany. And House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, is apparently fine enough with that to stick with the indicted ex-president.
In an interview for an episode this past weekend of “Face The Nation” on CBS, Johnson defended Trump’s language. “When President Trump says immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, is that a statement you agree with?” host Margaret Brennan asked. And here’s what Johnson told Brennan in reply: “That’s not language I would use, but I understand the urgency of President Trump’s admonition. He’s been saying this since he ran for president the first time that we have to secure the border, and I think the vast majority of the American people understand the necessity of that.”
In other words, the idea from Johnson is apparently that Trump’s rhetoric that’s been linked to Nazis leads to the same policy positions that at least the Louisianan’s corner of the GOP was heading towards anyway. Johnson went on to explicitly insist that Trump’s language was “not hateful.” To be clear, in the past, language mirroring rhetoric from Republican figures including Trump has been used by perpetrators in mass shootings, including one tragedy in El Paso, Texas, while Trump was in office. Not only did Trump and other Republicans refuse to distance themselves from false claims of an “invasion” by undocumented immigrants, they’ve arguably increased exponentially their reliance on that lie!
The Biden administration has proposed $14 billion in spending to help with border efforts, a prospect that Johnson has outright rejected, asserting in vague terms that it somehow doesn’t actually meet the problem. Talking about his ambitions in a recent CNN interview, Johnson asserted that Biden should visit the southern border. The president already did so — which Johnson acknowledged but then called somehow also not enough.
