Trump and His Mini-Me.
Photo: Wilfredo Lee/AP
In a joint press conference Friday at Mar-a-Lago that seemed designed to give some high-life MAGA protection to the embattled Speaker of the House, Donald Trump and Mike Johnson expressed their deep affection for each other before announcing support for legislation banning noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
Trump gave Johnson what he desperately needed by suggesting the Louisianan was doing about as good a job as possible as Speaker and implicitly promising to keep his acolyte Marjorie Taylor Greene from carrying through on her threats to take away Johnson’s gavel if he keeps working with Democrats on issues like aid to Ukraine. Presumably, Johnson understands that loyalty is a one-way street in MAGA land and that the man he called “the once and future president” won’t hesitate to toss him aside if it suits his purposes. But for now, Johnson can probably sleep a few nights with both eyes closed.
The Speaker reciprocated with his legislative plan to keep the “16 million illegals” Biden has allegedly “invited” into the country from stealing the November presidential election. There’s only one problem with this idea: It’s entirely redundant and unnecessary.
Johnson’s proposal is redundant because since 1996 noncitizens have been banned from voting in federal elections and deterred with potential jail sentences and immediate deportation. It’s unnecessary since repeated studies have yielded no evidence of significant levels of voting by noncitizens (even the one academic researcher who thinks it does happen more than once in a blue moon has dismissed Trump’s claims that it robbed him of a popular-vote win in 2016 as completely unfounded).
But the proposal is a great “messaging” device linking Trump’s two favorite subjects (“election integrity” and an alleged crisis of illegal immigration) and hinting not very subtly at the inflammatory “great replacement theory” whereby Democrats are opening the borders to drown white Christians in a demographic sea of bad, bad people who will be grateful to their left-wing liberators. Johnson and Trump tag-teamed aggressively on that idea in the Mar-a-Lago presser, with the Speaker emphasizing that the imminent danger of massive noncitizen voting is a by-product of Biden’s “design” to encourage illegal immigration, and with Trump ranting about non-white countries emptying their prisons and “insane asylums” at the eager request of Uncle Sam.
What makes this gambit dangerous is that it sets a premise for whatever mischief Trump and his allies choose to undertake if he loses the 2024 presidential election. The Johnson “election integrity” bill is going nowhere (being, as noted, a waste of time), so by negative inference, Democrats will stand accused of planning to stuff the ballot box with noncitizen votes. Should Trump decide once again to contest a defeat, the phantom menace of noncitizen voting can be combined with equally groundless objections to voting by mail to justify a rejection of the election’s legitimacy.
By participating in this dog and pony show involving phony-baloney conspiracy theories, Johnson is simply paying attention to his master’s voice. But the country could pay a high price for the moment of comfort he has secured by running to Daddy to protect him from MAGA wrath in the House.
Ed Kilgore
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