But he isn’t entirely stupid either
This lede from The New York Times could be defined as an understatement but I’m not inclined to slam it. At least they aren’t sayihng Mike Johnson is the new Winston Churchill like some people are fatuously contending:
The accolades directed at Speaker Mike Johnson in recent days for finally defying the right wing of his party and allowing an aid bill for Ukraine to move through the House might have seemed a tad excessive.
After all, a speaker’s entire job is to move legislation through the House, and as Saturday’s vote to pass the bill demonstrated, the Ukraine measure had overwhelming support. But Mr. Johnson’s feat was not so different from that of another embattled Republican who faced a difficult choice under immense pressure from hard-right Republicans and was saluted as a hero for simply doing his job: former Vice President Mike Pence.
When Mr. Pence refused former President Donald J. Trump’s demands that he overturn the 2020 election results as he presided over the electoral vote count by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — even as an angry mob with baseball bats and pepper spray invaded the Capitol and chanted “hang Mike Pence” — the normally unremarkable act of performing the duties in a vice president’s job description was hailed as courageous.
Mr. Pence and now Mr. Johnson represent the most high-profile examples of a stark political reality: In today’s Republican Party, subsumed by Mr. Trump, taking the norm-preserving, consensus-driven path can spell the end of your political career.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Pence, both mild-mannered, extremely conservative evangelical Christians who have put their faith at the center of their politics, occupy a similar space in their party. They have both gone through contortions to accommodate Mr. Trump and the forces he unleashed in their party, which in turn have ultimately come after them. Mr. Pence spent four years dutifully serving the former president and defending all of his words and actions. Mr. Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, played a lead role in trying to overturn the election results on Mr. Trump’s behalf.
But in two critical moments, when facing intense, sometimes violent, pressure from within their party, they both chose a more difficult path.
I guess it depends on what you think is more difficult: selling out your country or losing your political career which, if there is any justice in this world, you are likely to lose anyway — because you sold out your country. They could very well be defeated in November and beyond, as they have been in every election since 2018, and all this brown-nosing and genuflecting to these far right wingnuts will have been for naught. And anyway there are always purges of loyalists in authoritarian regimes, if only to keep all the sycophants on their toes, and religious goodie two-shoes types like Pence and Johnson usually top the list of potential human sacrifices. There’s no guarantee of survival under Trump whether you back him or not.
Sometimes doing the right thing is also the smart thing.