Mike Johnson told reporters on Thursday that former President Donald Trump praised his tenure as House Speaker.
“Does [Trump] want you to continue to be Speaker after the November election?” a reporter asked, after Johnson and congressional Republicans met with the party’s presumptive presidential nominee behind closed doors.
“He said very complimentary things about all of us,” Johnson said. “We had sustained applause. He said I'm doing a very good job. I mean, we're grateful for that. Look, we have to have continuity in leadership, we have to have a plan, and it has to be very carefully executed.”
Trump’s support of the Louisiana Republican comes after some right-wing House Republicans pushed to replace the Speaker in opposition of his leadership. In April, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) threatened his ousting if Johnson allowed a vote for wartime aid to Ukraine. Ultimately, the House killed the effort to remove Johnson in May.
Ahead of the November presidential election, Trump met with Republicans on Capitol Hill on Thursday as he seeks to lay out his priorities for a potential second term. The meeting was nearly three and half years after his supporters stormed the Capitol following Trump’s false claims about a stolen 2020 election. While many congressional Republicans support Trump, a faction of Republicans grapple with supporting a nominee embattled in legal cases.
“When he became president for the first time in 2017, I was a freshman in Congress at the time, and a lot of people on Capitol Hill didn't expect that that would be the eventuality,” Johnson continued. “They didn't actually believe that we would have unified government, where the Republican Party would control the White House, the Senate, and the House.”
“And so we lost a few steps, frankly, in the beginning of that Congress, the 115th Congress,” Johnson noted. “Because the plan was not fully prepared, and the implementation lagged a little bit. We're not going to make that mistake again.”
Johnson added, “What we're doing right now — you never put the cart before the horse — but we have to plan to lead because there's so many problems to fix.”
