On Sunday, a Fox News interviewer asked Speaker of the House Mike Johnson why he and Donald Trump are trying to coerce Democrats to end the government shutdown on the GOP’s terms by starving poor children.
A frustrated Johnson responded by saying: “Don’t get lost in the facts.”
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
BREAM: Schumer says Republicans are weaponizing hunger
MIKE JOHNSON: Absolutely absurd. Remember -- don't get lost in the facts
It’s been a tough month for the beleaguered speaker. After shutting down the House weeks ago to avoid a vote to compel Trump to release the Epstein files, these days he holds news conferences multiple times a week to “explain” why Republicans are so determined to make Affordable Care Act health coverage prohibitively expensive for millions of Americans that they are, literally, taking food out of the mouths of babies.
Donald Trump, to whom the GOP granted dictatorial powers nine months ago, has all but absented himself from fallout of the shutdown he and his cronies engineered. That’s left it to Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune to come up with a way to extricate the Trump and his captive Republican Party from the political jam they put themselves in, even as polls indicate the GOP is at growing odds with most of the American people.
CNN @cnn.com
"The polling on blame has been remarkably constant since before the shutdown began. People continue to blame President Donald Trump and the Republicans more than Democrats by double-digit margins in most surveys," writes Aaron Blake | Analysis https://cnn.it/4oeUatz
Johnson and Thune, who became legislative “leaders” at Trump’s sufferance and remain in their jobs only so long as they serve as his stooges, have proven themselves utterly unable to effectively negotiate with Democrats (perhaps because at Trump’s direction they refuse to). And Johnson has compounded what is becoming a full-blown disaster for his party by appointing himself to make the case for Republicans’ politically irrational, and increasingly amoral, course of conduct.
The speaker is a bad explainer, to say the least. Nearly every time he (and more rarely Trump) appears before the cameras to sell the GOP’s lies, he manages to unintentionally tell the truth — or, as Johnson puts it, “get lost in facts.” These admissions have advertised the fact that the regime is intent on using the shutdown to torment the poorest and most vulnerable among us, while Trump presides over the disaster as a self-declared dictator.
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