You Won’t Believe the Sick Irony of Trump and Johnson’s Meeting

House Speaker Mike Johnson is heading to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump to discuss a topic with which neither is familiar: election integrity.

According to MSNBC, Johnson and Trump will speak together on Friday, presumably to reminisce about their last joint venture. In 2020, Johnson, then a little-known Louisiana congressman, led an amicus brief supporting the Texas lawsuit that sought to stop the Supreme Court from certifying the election by challenging vote counts in key swing states. One hundred thirty-nine House Republicans signed on to the brief, even in the wake of the January 6 insurrection (which Johnson defended), and the flimsy legal logic undergirding the lawsuit became the go-to line for election deniers, including Trump himself.

When Johnson emerged as a possible replacement speaker in the wake of Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House, Trump threw his support behind his candidacy on Truth Social.

No details were yet available Wednesday about the exact topics Johnson and Trump will discuss, but any sign of Trump continuing to support Johnson could prove hugely beneficial to the embattled House speaker.

Since becoming speaker, Johnson has faced questions about his leadership. He’s been unable to rein in the right flank of his caucus and has been criticized as “weak” and an “appeaser.” To the extent that the GOP has united around him, it has done so to stifle criticism of his election denialism. A seal of approval from Trump could help bring the party together on actual legislation efforts too.

Johnson has insisted that Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, is “not calling the shots.” In one respect, he is correct, and it has nothing to do with “election integrity.” Both he and Trump are in perfect lockstep about subverting democratic elections in the United States.

Donald Trump is drawing another line in the sand, this time of the antisemitic variety. According to the GOP presidential nominee, if you’re Jewish, you can’t vote Democrat.

Trump traveled to Atlanta on Wednesday for a campaign event. While at the airport, when one reporter asked if he had spoken to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump went off on a wild rant.

“[President Joe] Biden has totally lost control of the Israel situation. He has abandoned Israel. He’s totally abandoned Israel,” Trump replied. “And frankly, he’s a low-IQ individual. He has no idea where he is and who he’s supporting.

“He doesn’t know if he’s supporting the Palestinians, but he knows one thing: He’s not supporting Israel. He has abandoned Israel,” Trump said. “And any Jewish person that votes for a Democrat or votes for Biden should have their head examined.”

Trump’s been thinking a lot about Jewish votes recently, and how he can convince the demographic to vote for him in November. During an interview on Real America’s Voice on Tuesday, Trump argued that “any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel” and ominously commented that those people “should be spoken to.”

“How a Jewish person person can vote for Biden is—or a Democrat, because they are on the side, 100 percent, of the Palestinians, and he doesn’t know how to get out of it. He’s stuck. But he is—if you look at what he’s done—he is totally on the side of the Palestinians,” Trump said, deriding the decision to vote blue as a “bad habit.”

“And frankly, it’s incredible that historically Jewish people vote for Democrats. To me, I cannot. And I know you’re Jewish, Wayne, and I know you vote for me, but I don’t understand it. And you probably don’t understand it either.”

On the other side of the aisle, progressives have continually slammed Biden for refusing to take a hard line with Netanyahu, either by calling for a cease-fire or pausing weapons shipments, even after the war has cost the lives of more than 32,000 Palestinians.

Biden’s harshest critique of Netanyahu came Tuesday, a week after an Israeli airstrike killed seven aid workers with World Central Kitchen in Gaza, including one Canadian American dual citizen. Biden described Netanyahu’s strategy as a “mistake” and added that he didn’t “agree with his approach.”

Donald Trump, with the help of “the king of subprime car loans,” has posted the $175 million bond for his civil fraud case, ostensibly giving him time to appeal the $454 million judgment against him for inflating his wealth in his business dealings. There’s just one problem: New York Attorney General Letitia James isn’t buying it.

By posting the bond, which was lowered upon appeal of the original figure, Trump theoretically delayed the state of New York seizing his assets. After all, as the bond supposedly indicates, he’s good for the money. But as more information on the surety backing the bond surfaces, it’s not clear that’s true.

According to Newsweek, James is arguing that Trump must file a motion by Monday guaranteeing that either he or the surety can be “justified.” She cited a statute that dictates Trump or Knight Specialty Insurance Company, which underwrote his bond, have 10 days to prove they are good for the bond. If they can’t, the bond will be declared “without effect” and James can begin seizing Trump’s assets to cover the judgment.

It would be an embarrassing end to the bond saga, which has seen the former president and former ultrarich person reduced to hawking sneakers and meme stocks to cover his legal fees. Most recently, he’s enlisted the help of Knight Specialty Insurance Company to back the $175 million. After Trump put up the bond on April 1, the court’s filing system rejected it due to paperwork errors, prompting James to question the solvency of Knight Specialty, which is not licensed as an insurer in New York.

As it turns out, the company has nowhere near the capital and surplus to guarantee Trump’s bond. What’s more, the legal document it produced does not seem to promise to pay the full penalty if Trump’s appeal fails.

As a result, Trump may not be off the hook after all. It might just cost him a few of his favorite properties.

House Speaker Mike Johnson is in a terrible political position, and his caucus knows it.

With a razor-thin margin to spare on any vote, Johnson has spent much of his term either stalling on advancing conservative policy goals or working with Democrats in order to pass anything—much to the chagrin of his party. If Johnson was hoping that last week’s recess would cool in-party tensions and help him rein in his caucus, then his plan hasn’t panned out in the slightest.

“Certainly, the speaker has a tough time right now trying to figure out, sort of, the path forward with the slim majority that we have,” Republican Study Committee Chair Representative Kevin Hern told The Daily Beast.

So far, Johnson has wavered on sending more aid to Ukraine amid its ongoing war with Russia, reauthorizing a surveillance program, and sending articles of impeachment for Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas to the Senate. The aide described holding off on sending the Mayorkas impeachment articles as “another example of the clusterfuck that is the House under Speaker Johnson.”

Unfortunately for Johnson, at this point, any decision could be fatal for the speaker’s tenure at the top of the House.

“Look, this is not your father’s Republican Party, as that old saying goes, this is a different breed of cat. This is … Trump runs that party. He maintains a sort of a death grip on it,” President Joe Biden told Univision News on Tuesday, adding that he believes Johnson is “worried about losing the speakership” under the circumstances.

Since taking the gavel in a surprise election that saw more seasoned Republican leaders fail to galvanize the party, Johnson has struggled to carry out even the most basic responsibilities of Congress. It doesn’t help that he inherited a historically divided GOP that, even before he took over, constituted the majority of one of the least productive congressional sessions in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to remove Johnson from his office looms large. She resumed her attacks against him on Tuesday, issuing a memo to her Republican colleagues in an attempt to curry support for Johnson’s ousting.

“If these actions by the leader of our conference continue, then we are not a Republican Party—we are a uniparty that is hellbent on remaining on the path of self-inflicted destruction,” she wrote. “I will neither support nor take part in any of that, and neither will the people we represent.”

Last month, Greene filed a motion to vacate Johnson after he worked with Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass a $1.2 trillion omnibus bill, putting a cap on a half-year ordeal to accomplish one of the legislature’s primary annual responsibilities: funding the government.

But biding time seems to be a winning strategy for the Georgia Republican. As the weeks pass, more Republicans have started to openly voice their frustrations with Johnson, including Representative Thomas Massie, who accused the Louisiana lawmaker of failing to meet conservative goals.

Each dissenting voice is critical. A vote to strip the gavel from Johnson needs just three GOP dissenters under the current makeup of the House, but could drop down to two if Greene decides to wait for Wisconsin Representative Mike Gallagher’s retirement on April 19.

Former Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg, who pleaded guilty to perjury in Donald Trump’s civil fraud trial, was sentenced Wednesday to five months in prison.

Weisselberg admitted to New York City District Attorney Alvin Bragg that he lied under oath in July 2020 about knowing that Trump overvalued his Manhattan apartment. Trump was found to have consistently lied about his fortune to prop up his real estate business.

The Republican presidential nominee recently posted the $175 million bond, with the help of right-wing billionaire Don Hankey, while he appeals the $454 million judgment in the fraud case.

Weisselberg was found guilty of perjury in March. He has been a longtime ally and confidant of Trump’s and was rewarded for his loyalty over the years with under-the-table benefits, including expensive apartments and cars, which also served to mask a massive tax fraud scheme.

This is the second five-month sentence for Weisselberg: He was also found guilty of tax fraud in 2022, having helped the Trump Organization hide unreported income from New York City and state tax authorities. He served 100 days of the original sentence.