House Speaker Mike Johnson has complained that he is constantly being asked to respond to Donald Trump’s deranged remarks.
Johnson, who is third in line to the presidency, moaned to CNN’s Manu Raju that he is being “baited” into reacting to the president’s unhinged comments after being asked whether he was OK with Trump referring to nations like Somalia as “s--thole countries.”
“Look, I’m baited every day with asking to be made—asked to comment about what the president or other members say or do,” Johnson told Raju while pacing through the corridors of the Capitol.
When Raju replied, “It’s the president of the United States, don’t you have an opinion on it?” Johnson responded, “Yeah, well, of course I have an opinion. That’s not the way I speak, and you know that.
“But the president is expressing his frustration about the extraordinary challenge that is presented to America when you have people coming in, not assimilating, and trying to take over the country,” Johnson added. “We had illegal aliens, like 20 million of them under four years of Biden. It’s a crisis for the country, and that’s the frustration you hear in his voice and the language he uses.”
Trump appeared at the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday in what was supposed to be an attempt to convince tens of millions of Americans struggling in a cost-of-living crisis that the economy is actually in a good place.
Instead, the 79-year-old veered into several unhinged tangents, launching a series of disturbing attacks against “hell hole” countries and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, a U.S. citizen who came to America as a child while fleeing Somalia’s civil war.
During the rant, Trump confirmed reports from 2018 that he exploded at lawmakers over why the U.S. was accepting immigrants from Haiti and “s--thole countries” in Africa rather than places like Norway—a slur he denied at the time.
“We had a meeting, and I say, ‘Why is it we only take people from s--thole countries? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few?’” Trump told the MAGA crowd on Tuesday. “But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.”
Johnson’s lashing out at reporters for the audacity of asking him to respond to the president’s comments comes as the House speaker has increasingly been mocked for pleading ignorance about major developments involving the Trump administration.
As noted by The Guardian, there have been at least 14 instances in which Johnson has responded with some variation of “I don’t know anything about that” when asked about controversies involving Trump or the MAGA administration.
These include professing ignorance about Trump accepting a $400 million Boeing 747-8 from Qatar, and claiming he “didn’t see” a Wall Street Journal report revealing that Trump signed a birthday message in 2008 for the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
When asked about a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth committed a potential war crime by ordering a follow-up strike to kill survivors on an alleged Venezuelan drug boat, Johnson replied, “I’m not going to prejudge any of that. I was pretty busy yesterday. I didn’t follow a lot of the news.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Johnson for comment.
