Johnson said in 2015 that Trump was unfit and could be “dangerous” as president

Years before playing a leading role in his efforts to help President Donald J. Trump stay in office after the 2020 election or defending him in two separate Senate impeachment trials, Speaker Mike Johnson flatly claimed that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could play an important role. danger as president.

“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and moral center that we so desperately need back in the White House,” Mr Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on August 7, 2015, before joining the Congress was elected. a day after the first Republican primary debate of the campaign cycle.

Challenged in the comments by someone defending Mr Trump, Mr Johnson replied: “I’m afraid he might break more things than he fixes. He is naturally hot-headed, and that is a dangerous trait in a commander-in-chief.”

Mr. Johnson, then a state lawmaker in Louisiana, also wondered what would happen if “he decided to bomb another head of state merely without respect for him? I’m only half-joking about this. I just don’t think he has the attitude to be president.”

The comments came as many Republicans, who would later become Trump loyalists, disparaged him and declared him unfit to hold the nation’s highest office. Only later did they fall into line and serve as front-line defenders of his most extreme words and actions.

But Mr. Johnson’s anti-Trump screed has so far flown under the radar, largely because Mr. Johnson himself did so before his unlikely election as chairman last month left him a runner-up for the presidency.

Today, Mr. Johnson merely praises Mr. Trump and defends him against what he dismisses as politically motivated charges and criminal charges. Mr Trump has praised Mr Johnson as someone who has acted as a loyal soldier since the start of his political rise.

In a lengthy statement to The New York Times on Monday evening, Mr. Johnson said his comments were made before he knew Mr. Trump personally, and attributed them to the fact that “his style was very different from mine.”

He continued: “During his 2016 campaign, President Trump quickly won over me and millions of my fellow Republicans. When I got to know him personally shortly after we both arrived in Washington in 2017, I came to appreciate the person he is and the qualities of him that made him the extraordinary president that he was.

Mr Johnson, who campaigned for Mr Trump in 2020 and has endorsed his 2024 bid, added: “Since we met we have always had a very good and friendly relationship. The President and I enjoy working together, and I look forward to doing so again when he returns to the White House.”

A spokesman for Mr. Trump declined to comment on the reports.

In 2015, Mr. Johnson, who would announce his first run for Congress the following year, wrote that he was shocked while watching Mr. Trump’s debate performance with his wife and children.

“What bothered me most was watching the face of my exceptional 10-year-old son, Jack, at one point as he looked at me with a sort of confused disappointment as the leader of all the polls bragged about the fact that he called a woman a “fat pig.” .’”

In one of the most famous exchanges from that debate, Megyn Kelly, a moderator and then a Fox News host, asked Mr. Trump about his history of referring to women as “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals.”

“Just Rosie O’Donnell,” Mr. Trump replied. He added that the country’s problem was political correctness, something he had no time for.

Mr Johnson was shocked.

“Can you imagine the noble, selfless characters of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln or Reagan continuing as Trump did last night?” wrote Mr. Johnson, an evangelical Christian. He noted that voters should demand a “much higher standard of virtue and decency” than what he had just witnessed.

During the Trump administration, Mr. Johnson had a friendly relationship with the president. In 2020, he accompanied him, along with other House Republicans, to the national championship game between Louisiana State University and Clemson.

After that year’s election, he played a leading role in recruiting Republicans in the House of Representatives to sign a legal brief, rooted in baseless claims of widespread election irregularities, in support of a lawsuit aimed at undo the results. On November 8, 2020, Mr. Johnson was on stage at a church in northwest Louisiana speaking about Christianity in America when Mr. Trump called him to discuss legal challenges to the election results.

In recent years, Mr. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, has used a podcast he co-hosted with his wife to defend Mr. Trump against four different charges and the criminal charges against him.

“I think all these false prosecutions are openly weaponized political prosecutions of Donald Trump,” Mr. Johnson said in one episode.

On the other hand, Mr. Johnson declared, “Nobody did a better job in the White House than President Trump.”

During last month’s speaker’s race, Mr. Trump praised Mr. Johnson, noting that he was someone who had “supported me in both mind and spirit from the very beginning of our GREAT victory of 2016.”

Mr Johnson is far from the only one who has expressed deep concerns about Mr Trump, only to later embrace him and his agenda.

In 2015, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina called Mr. Trump a “race-baiting, xenophobic, religious fanatic,” as well as a “crazy,” “crazy” and a man “unfit for office.” He subsequently served as Trump’s most loyal defender in the Senate.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the second-to-last man standing in the 2016 Republican primaries, called Mr. Trump a “pathological liar” who was “utterly amoral,” a “serial philanderer” and a “narcissist on a certain level’. I don’t think this country has ever seen that.” Mr. Cruz has explained his decision to become a loyal defender of Mr. Trump as something that was a “responsibility” to his voters.

Mick Mulvaney, the former Republican congressman who would later become the president’s acting chief of staff, in 2016 called his future boss a “terrible human being” who had made “disgusting and indefensible” comments about women.

Unlike other rule-abiding lawmakers, Mr. Johnson has cast himself as someone with deep religious convictions, whose worldview is driven by his faith.