House Speaker Mike Johnson will stand Friday with Donald Trump at an appearance that will amplify the former president’s most damaging falsehood: that America’s democratic elections are catastrophically tainted by fraud.
The country’s most powerful elected Republican, who is seeking to save his job under threat from Trump-aligned members of his own party in Congress, will travel to meet the true power in the GOP at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. The visit comes as the the ex-president’s allies are eviscerating his authority and even threatening to topple him.
It also takes place three days before Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, becomes the first former president to go on trial, with the beginning of jury selection in a New York case related to a hush money payment to an adult film star. And there will be another twist Friday in the legal saga over Trump’s forthcoming trial in Florida over his hoarding of classified documents. Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, whose no-rush management of pre-trial litigation means it’s increasingly unlikely the case will be adjudicated before November’s election, will hear an attempt by two of Trump’s co-accused to have the case dismissed.
The announced topic of Johnson and Trump’s joint public statement on Friday is “election integrity” – the catch-all term for the stew of conspiracy theories and lies about the 2020 election that Trump is now using as the foundation of his 2024 bid for a new term. The price for Republicans seeking the ex-president’s support has long been a willingness to promote his fictional stolen election conceit. So Johnson’s visit to Trump’s residence may suggest he’s ready to make a similar down payment if the ex-president prevents his ouster as speaker.
The two GOP leaders are expected to draw attention to what they say are state proposals and lawsuits that would allow non-citizens to vote, CNN’s Kristen Holmes and Fredreka Schouten reported Thursday. Some cities or jurisdictions do allow non-citizens to cast ballots in non-federal elections — for positions on school boards for example. But federal law bans non-citizens from voting in federal elections and any who do risk fines, prison terms and deportation. Given these punishments, many voting rights groups assess there’s no widespread problem to address. The state of Georgia, with nearly 8 million registered voters conducted a statewide audit and found that 1,634 potential non-citizens had tried to register to vote between 1997 and early 2022 but none were successful.
But given Trump’s incessant attempts to blur distinctions, and to falsely claim undocumented migrants vote in US elections in large numbers as part of a Democratic plot, the distinction is likely to be lost on many people who are not familiar with the subtleties of the issue.
The stolen election falsehood that dominates the GOP
Johnson’s willingness to lend the authority of his office to Trump’s “election integrity” campaign shows how Trump’s stolen election conspiracy theory has consumed almost every pillar of power in the GOP.
The Republican National Committee has become even more vociferous in campaigning and fundraising on the false premise that the 2020 election was corrupt since Trump took it over and installed loyalists after becoming the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
CNN’s KFile reported that the RNC sent out a scripted call to voters’ phones on behalf of new co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, that said Democrats committed “fraud” in the 2020 election. It warned that if “Democrats have their way, your vote could be canceled out by someone who isn’t even an American citizen.” Trump’s election falsehoods also inspired many GOP state legislatures to pass laws in the name of election security that may make it harder to vote and could make it easier for political officials to interfere in elections. Trump’s multiple failed lawsuits and even his own Attorney General William Barr offered testimony to the lack of widespread voter fraud in 2020. But Trump remains locked in his false reality.
Trump and Johnson are also expected to relitigate the 2020 election during Friday’s press conference, a Trump adviser told CNN. The House speaker is no stranger to satisfying Trump’s craving for validation of his stolen election narrative. After the 2020 election, Johnson, then a Republican back bencher, emailed every House Republican seeking signatures for an amicus brief in a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate electoral college votes from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
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Trump first raised the falsehood of non-citizens corrupting US elections back in 2016, claiming with zero evidence that millions of undocumented immigrants voted for his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton, costing him a popular vote win even though he was victorious in the Electoral College.
In the 2024 election, the new focus on the idea that non-citizens are corrupting US voter rolls provides neat synergy with one of Trump’s chief election themes: that the country is facing an invasion from undocumented migrants who are bringing crime and disease to the country due to President Joe Biden’s perceived failures during a crisis at the southern border. The ex-president also frequently cites a tenet of the racist “great replacement theory” that Democrats are importing foreigners en masse to register them to vote in the 2024 election. “IT’S SO THEY CAN VOTE, VOTE, VOTE,” Trump said on his Truth Social network in December. No facts back up these claims of a Republican presumptive nominee who has warned immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.
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