Copyright inquisitr
House Speaker Mike Johnson is having what might be the roughest stretch of his political career. With the federal government still stuck in shutdown limbo, Johnson is taking the blame from every direction and even some conservative commentators are turning on him. “It’s been a tough month for the beleaguered speaker,” political columnist David Lurie wrote this week in Public Notice, describing Johnson as a man “driving his party into the ditch.” Lurie argued that the Louisiana Republican’s handling of the crisis has become a case study in self-sabotage, as his attempts to defend the GOP’s position keep backfiring. After shutting down the House earlier this fall to avoid a vote that could have forced Donald Trump to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, Johnson has spent the past few weeks bouncing between press conferences, trying to explain why Republicans are pushing policies that critics say make health care more expensive while cutting food benefits for low-income families. “They are literally taking food out of the mouths of babies,” Lurie wrote. The chaos hasn’t been helped by Trump himself, who keeps shifting his message about the shutdown and leaving Johnson to clean up the confusion. “It’s like trying to run a meeting when your boss keeps changing the agenda mid-sentence,” one Republican strategist told reporters. The former president has been largely absent from the day-to-day negotiations, but his shadow looms over every move Johnson makes. Democrats, meanwhile, have stayed united in demanding that any deal to reopen the government include an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies for millions of Americans. Some have hinted at finding a bipartisan compromise, but Johnson’s stance — and his refusal to budge has made progress nearly impossible. Lurie said Johnson has “compounded what is becoming a full-blown disaster” by making himself the public face of a losing argument. “The speaker is a bad explainer,” he wrote. “Nearly every time he appears before the cameras to sell the GOP’s message, he manages to accidentally tell the truth or, as Johnson puts it, ‘get lost in facts.’” That phrase, get lost in facts, has become a viral punchline, popping up across social media as the government shutdown stretches on. It captures the growing sense that the speaker’s strategy: deflect, deny, and delay is falling flat. Adding to his headaches, Johnson keeps getting dragged into unrelated controversies. He’s had to answer questions about aggressive immigration raids that swept up innocent people, Trump’s bizarre pardon of a crypto billionaire he later claimed not to remember, and even the internal squabbling within his own party. His go-to response: he hasn’t seen the reports and has no comment. The longer this goes on, the worse it looks. Polls show most Americans now blame Republicans and Trump for the shutdown, while Johnson’s approval rating within his own party is slipping. Analysts warn that the eventual deal to reopen the government, which most agree will happen sooner or later, will likely weaken both Johnson and Trump. As Lurie put it, “Trump, the self-styled dictatorial strongman, will end up diminished.” But he added one hopeful note: maybe, just maybe, “the poor children of our very rich nation will come out of the imbroglio Trump and Johnson have manufactured with sufficient food to eat.”
