The Accidental Speaker

You could be forgiven for thinking it was Mike Johnson’s idea to host the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, though in fact the conference has gathered there for several years. Step into the upper lobby, red staircase runner giving way to gleaming black-and-white tile, symmetrical furnishings, George Washington gazing east from his gilded-frame portrait above a marble fireplace, and for a moment Johnson’s fantasy of what Congress once was, what it could be—what he tries to convince himself it actually still is—seems suddenly more plausible.

When House Republicans met there in March, Johnson was in his fifth month as speaker of the House, and his victory of this past weekend, in which he secured funding for the Ukraine war, seemed completely improbable. In fact his whole tenure seemed improbable back in March, defined almost entirely by Republican infighting. But here at the Greenbrier: How could one not aspire to civility?

At the conclusion of the retreat, I met Johnson in a small, mustard-hued room in one of the more secluded corridors of the resort. At 52, he is a curiously unimposing presence—horn-rimmed glasses, ruminative expression—with little of the gravitas one might assume of the person second in line to the presidency. Really, he just looked tired. But he was pleased with these past few days, he said, the opportunity to bring much of the conference together and reinforce the central themes of his young tenure. “What I try to do, my leadership style,” Johnson explained, “is that I bring in the Freedom Caucus, and then I bring in Main Street or Problem Solvers Caucus guys—people from across the conference with disparate views—and I put them around the conference table in the speaker’s office, and we just hash it out, let them debate and talk.”

Even before he ascended to the speakership, Johnson had oriented his nascent brand around the politics of civility, his guidepost the image of President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill: clashing views on policy, but a relationship governed by trust in the other’s good faith, a desire to get to yes. In January 2017, just days into his first term in Congress, Johnson drafted and invited colleagues from both parties to sign the “Commitment to Civility,” a pledge in the midst of the “increasing division in and coarsening of our culture,” to show “proper respect to one another” and “set an example of statesmanship for the younger generations.” (Twenty-nine Republicans and 21 Democrats signed.)

Yet by the time Johnson declared his interest in becoming speaker of the House, nearly seven years later, his ambitions of civility and dignified disagreement had grown only further detached from his party’s prevailing impulses, and remained entirely at odds with its undisputed leader, a man whose closest approximation of statesmanship is extending his “best wishes to all, even the haters and losers.”

When Johnson assumed the speakership in October, an all-but-accidental selection after a series of failed candidates, he had few useful models for bringing a fractious Republican conference to harmony, or even succeeding in the role more generally, at least not in this century. In the brief historical survey of Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former speaker: “He had Kevin [McCarthy], who didn’t last. The last speaker before that, Paul Ryan—respected on both sides of the aisle, but decided to leave. John Boehner, same thing—made a decision to leave in the course of the year, just decided, ‘This is it, I’m out of here.’ And before that, the speaker went to prison, so …”

Johnson would quickly learn that not even his own hard-line brand of conservatism—a record in lockstep with the Republican base on issues from abortion to Donald Trump’s border wall—could insulate him from far-right charges of betrayal. In the past six months, he has seen his closest ideological allies become his most outspoken opponents, their belligerence manifesting in a ceaseless churn of failed procedural votes, public denunciations of his leadership, and, now, the threat of his removal.

On Saturday, the House voted to pass Johnson’s massive foreign-aid package, including $61 billion for Ukraine. The speaker relied primarily on Democrats to clear the “critically important” measure, as he deemed it, a dynamic that only reinforced the far-right resolve to cut his speakership short.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene castigated Johnson on X as a “traitor” to his conference and country, and assured reporters that she would continue gathering support for her motion to vacate him from the job; two other members are currently backing the effort. For Republicans, it was the culmination of a week marked not by high-level debate so much as new variations of schoolyard petulance: As the speaker—a “Sanctimonious Twerp,” Steve Bannon decreed him—attempted to broker consensus on the future of the global democratic order, his colleagues stood on the House floor and told one another to “kick rocks, tubby.”

Johnson’s earliest intimations of a political philosophy were anchored in the fact of his existence. Friends of Jeanne Messina had urged her to consider an abortion; she and Pat Johnson were only in high school, both of humble circumstances in south Shreveport, Louisiana. But instead, they’d gotten married, and welcomed James Michael in January 1972; three more children followed. “Exactly one year before Roe v. Wade, my parents, who were just teenagers at the time, chose life,” Johnson said at the annual March for Life rally earlier this year. “And I am very profoundly grateful that they did.” In all things God works for the good of those who love him: This Mike Johnson was taught to trust.

And he had to trust this, because how else could he have made sense of the events of September 17, 1984? On that afternoon, his father, an assistant chief of the Shreveport Fire Department, was summoned to the Dixie Cold Storage plant on the report of an ammonia leak. In rubberized suits, he and his partner ventured into one of the vaults to locate and cap the valve, their flashlights barely cutting through the dark. Then: an explosion, screams, both men on fire, everything around them on fire, Pat Johnson’s suit and then flesh melting off his body as he squeezed through a hole in the wall later estimated to be no more than 12 inches square. His partner died two days later in the hospital; Pat, with burns covering more than 72 percent of his body, clung improbably to life. The family prayed, Jeanne playing tapes of the Psalms at her husband’s bedside. Ten days into his stay involving more than three dozen surgeries, Pat was finally able to speak. “Pat told me today that he would make it!” Jeanne recorded in her diary, according to a 1987 book about the explosion and its aftermath. “I asked him how he knew; he said, ‘The Lord.’”

“I was 12 years old, and I watched them,” Johnson told me. “Faith was not some ethereal concept—we prayed and believed, and it happened.”

In some ways his childhood ended with the fire. His mother regularly spent nights in the hospital waiting room, often returning home only at the coaxing of doctors. Mike, meanwhile, helped take care of his three siblings. His role as man of the house became necessarily more literal when his father, not long after the accident, left the family in search of purpose and drier climates, remarrying and divorcing several times. Out of this crucible emerged an uncommonly serious and diligent teenager, the class president and Key Club officer and speech trophy winner. At Louisiana State University, the Interfraternity Council president didn’t drink, one Kappa Sigma brother recalls, but he never seemed to look down on those who did, either.

He was just shy of his law degree at LSU when, in May 1998, at a friend’s wedding, he met Kelly Lary, an elementary-school teacher who wore a red dress and ordered Diet Coke at the bar. Six months later, they were engaged. In a spring ceremony at First Baptist Church of Bossier, the two entered into a “covenant marriage,” a legal distinction in Louisiana providing stricter grounds for divorce. They soon became the legal guardians of a Black teenager named Michael James, whom Johnson had met while volunteering at a Christian youth ministry in Baton Rouge. The couple would go on to have four biological children.

Johnson’s ideological worldview developed in tandem with the final triumphant stirrings of the Moral Majority. As an attorney, he worked for the Alliance Defense Fund (now the Alliance Defending Freedom) and served on the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, articulating a conservatism anchored in the SBC’s position on abortion and LGBTQ rights, an image of government actively engaged in the delineation of moral rectitude. In columns for the Shreveport Times, Johnson described same-sex marriage as “the dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy that could doom even the strongest republic,” tied his state’s population drain to the proliferation of “adult entertainment,” and heralded George W. Bush’s election in 2004 as a referendum on the “militant anti-religious” character of much of the Democratic Party. After winning election to the Louisiana state House, in 2015, he quickly burnished his political identity as a “social issues warrior,” as Baton Rouge’s The Advocate newspaper called him.

Yet like many of his peers in the post-Reagan sweep of movement conservatism, Johnson bracketed his grave portents of moral decline with the default assurance that America remained the shining city on a hill, its best days yet ahead. From a young age, he saw in Reagan an unreservedly conservative politics tempered by a conviction that bipartisanship was both desirable and still possible. During the 2008 Republican presidential primary, Johnson would take to Mike Huckabee’s line: “I’m a conservative, but I’m not mad at everybody over it.”

Of course, by the time Johnson won election to Congress, eight years later, Huckabee was mad; everybody in the Republican Party, it seemed, was mad. Nevertheless Johnson proceeded to Washington apparently intent on marshaling the wisdom gleaned from his leadership of his junior class at Captain Shreve High: “Our class has a history of being a diverse but well-unified group,” he’d told the yearbook. “I believe this was the reason we achieved so much and had so much fun all the while.”

Less than a year into his first term representing Louisiana’s Fourth District, Johnson was with his two younger sons at D.C.’s Reagan airport when they happened upon Democratic Representative John Lewis. And certainly this seemed fun, the boys’ gap-toothed smiles as they posed on either side of the civil-rights icon for a curbside photo, which Johnson uploaded to Facebook. “As we waited for our rides, the legendary civil rights leader told the boys about being the youngest speaker and one of the ‘Big Six’ organizers at the 1963 March on Washington—speaking to an enormous crowd after Dr. King’s celebrated ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Wow!” he captioned the post, adding: “I’m happy to show my sons that two men with different party affiliations and ideas can still get along in this town.”

“I WAS TAUGHT YOU DONT SLEEP WITH THE ENEMY .. MR JOHNSON SOUNDS TWO FACED TO ME , I MADE A MISTAKE VOTING FOR HIM ..”

There is of course some romance to the idea: Mike Johnson startling at a sudden tap on his shoulder, turning to find the speaker’s gavel being presented to him—no, urged on him—by the bleary-eyed conscripts of a leaderless tribe. Johnson himself can seem partial to it. “I was just content to be a lieutenant,” he said during our conversation. “So when it happened, I wasn’t expecting it.”

Kevin McCarthy was only eight months into his speakership when, on October 3, 2023, eight conservative hard-liners—enraged, ostensibly, by a recent bipartisan deal to avert a government shutdown—voted with Democrats to oust him from the job. In the immediate scramble to anoint McCarthy’s successor, a handful of obvious contenders emerged, among them the House majority leader and Louisiana Republican, Steve Scalise, and Jim Jordan, chair of the Judiciary Committee and a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus. Representative Matt Gaetz floated Johnson as another potential replacement, but Johnson would wait three weeks before declaring his own candidacy. He “held back,” he told me, largely out of deference to Scalise (“who’s like my brother”) and then Jordan (“who’s like my other brother, my mentor”), both of whose bids would fail. And also, Johnson went on, “because a mentor told me when I was in eighth grade, ‘Always remember that real leadership is recognized, not imposed.’”