Over the weekend Donald Trump committed one of the worst verbal “glitches” of the campaign so far. After delivering his standard line about how Joe Biden should be forced to take a cognitive test and rambling on about how he had “aced” his, Trump then said:
“Doc Ronny Johnson, does everyone know Doc Ronny Johnson from Texas? He was the White House doctor and he said that I was the healthiest, he feels, president in history so I liked him very much.”
Trump was very close with this former admiral (busted down to captain for his inappropriate behavior, drinking and drug use) doctor, now congressman. I wrote about their relationship some years back:
Brig. Gen. Dr. Richard Tubb, said in a letter that the doctor had been attached like “Velcro” to Trump since Inauguration Day. Tubb explained that [the] office is “one of only a very few in the White House Residence proper,” located directly across the hall from the president’s private elevator. He said that “on any given day ‘physician’s office,’ as it is known, is generally the first and last to see the President.”
They were tight and Trump surely knows (or knew) that his last name is Jackson not Johnson and yet he said it wrong twice. But then he does that doesn’t he? Recall that he also repeatedly confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi at another rally earlier this year. But doing it in the same breath that he’s slagging Biden’s cognitive abilities takes it to a whole other level of absurdity.
If I had to guess, Trump was confusing Jackson’s name with Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, with whom he’s been reportedly on the phone a lot lately, harranguing him to somehow overturn his New York criminal conviction. (Perhaps he confused him with his former fixer Michael Cohen…)
Politico reported that Trump is obsessed with the idea of using congressional power to go after Democrats he believes have “weaponized” the justice system.
It’s a campaign he orchestrated in the days after his May 31 conviction on 34 felony counts in New York, starting with a phone call to the man he wanted to lead it: Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump was still angry when he made the call, according to those who have heard accounts of it from Johnson, dropping frequent F-bombs as he spoke with the soft-spoken and pious GOP leader.
“We have to overturn this,” Trump insisted.
That’s an interesting choice of words don’t you think? He has quite the habit of calling people up and demanding they “overturn ” results he doesn’t like. Recall the famous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger demanding that he “find” just enough votes to overturn the presidential election. Likewise he said publicly more than once that he believed the Supreme Court would overturn the results of the 2020 election, largely because the three he put on the bench owed it to him. At one point he was just posting #OVERTURN on social media.
That obviously didn’t work but it hasn’t stopped him from deploying the same demands in the wake of his conviction last month. And it appears that unlike Raffensberger, Johnson is ready and willing to do what he can to help. After all, he was an election denier before it was cool.
Back in 2020, Johnson was among those who argued that some states officials had changing voting procedures to accommodate the deadly pandemic was unconstitutional and he reportedly strong armed 125 House members to join him in a Supreme Court brief supporting a lawsuit filed in Texas to overturn the elections in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin. According to ABC, ” he told them Donald Trump was watching” and let it be known that he was in close contact with the then president.
The Supreme Court refused the case due to lack of standing but Johnson didn’t let up. He trafficked in some of kookiest election conspiracy theories including that the Dominion voting machines were rigged and were tied to the Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez who had been dead for years. He’s a card-carrying election denier who will do everything he can to help Trump this November if he wants to challenge the results again (which he and the RNC are already setting up to do should he lose.)
Trump obviously knows this which is why he immediately got Johnson on the horn after the conviction, hurling F-bombs about how Johnson needs to overturn it, despite the fact that he is the Speaker of the House not a New York Appellate Court judge. Politico reported that Johnson was already on board:
The speaker didn’t really need to be convinced, one person familiar with the conversation said: Johnson, a former attorney himself, already believed the House had a role to play in addressing Trump’s predicament. The two have since spoken on the subject multiple times.
Whether he can fulfill Trump’s demands is another story. They managed to vote to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt last week but it wasn’t easy. It’s unknown if they will be able to pass any of their proposals to go after those who are prosecuting Trump and the move to pass a law allowing presidents to move state cases to federal court is still pending. While he once said that “defunding” Jack Smith’s office was unworkable, Johnson is now pursuing it but one senior appropriator told Politico that the defunding gambit is “stupid” and there is little indication that there are enough votes for any of this.
So perhaps Johnson’s just doing all this to appease his hard right flank and keep them from trying to oust him from the Speaker’s office. More likely, he’s trying to help Trump and from the way it sounds he’s more than happy to do it on principle.
After Trump demanded he overturn the conviction Johnson went on Fox and Friends and reassured everyone that his pals on the Supreme Court were going to take care of it:
“I think that the justices on the court—I know many of them personally—I think they are deeply concerned about that, as we are. So I think they’ll set this straight. This will be overturned, guys, there’s no question about it; it’s just going to take some time to do it.”
That had to be music to Trump’s ears and it no doubt made him love the speaker even more. But I hope Johnson doesn’t expect him to remember it. He’s been having a little trouble in that department lately. At this point, Trump could confuse him with Mike Pence and all that goodwill would go right out the window.
Salon
Sometimes, I surprise myself. I wrote this last night. This pops up this morning: