Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, says the MAGA figurehead’s presidency might effectively be cut short come November.
After a State of the Union address full of President Donald Trump’s usual insults and rambling, Johnson spoke to Newsmax live and was surprisingly candid about the future of Trump’s presidency.
“He needs all four years, not just two to fix the mess,” Johnson said, adding, “If we lost the midterms, heaven forbid, if we lost the majority in the House, it would be the end of the Trump presidency in a real effect, so we gotta keep this going.”
Trump himself has previously warned that he could be “impeached” if Republicans lose too many seats in the House. Puck News reports that the president has a $1.4 billion war chest to see off this potential disaster.
However, Trump has been historically reluctant to bankroll the campaigns of Republican juniors. But Puck suggests that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair, and former campaign manager Chris LaCivita have been poring over what races Trump should fund, if any.
“No major decisions have been made, and they’re still working to get the big guy to green-light the spending,” one campaign operative told Puck.
Trump was perhaps reminded of the urgency with which he needs to act as members of his party got trounced at the polls even as he delivered his State of the Union address.
Three Democrats captured state House seats in special elections in Maine and Pennsylvania, allowing the party to preserve narrow majorities in both chambers and providing an early read on voter priorities in two states expected to be pivotal to congressional control in November.
This contradicted Trump’s insistence that he has masterminded an economic “turnaround for the ages,” and that the affordability crisis was a “dirty, rotten lie” concocted by Democrats.
In both states, affordability, housing, and ICE’s heavy-handed enforcement tactics were voters’ primary concerns, according to the Morning Star and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Elsewhere, Democratic candidates outperformed the president’s 2024 electoral results by 10 to 14 points in 20 state-level special elections in Virginia, New York, Minnesota, and Connecticut.
In a Texas district that Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, first-time state Senate candidate Taylor Rehmet beat his Republican rival by 13 points, becoming the first Democrat to hold the seat in decades.
Those results have newly competitive seats emerging ahead of the midterms, putting additional districts into play and forcing Johnson to make on-air pleas to voters.
