Mike Johnson didn’t exactly seamlessly rocket into his House Speakership position. In fact, it was a rather rocky and embarrassing fiasco for the Republican Party as a whole and frankly, his five-month tenure hasn’t looked any more promising.
Rep. Johnson has been the Republican Speaker of the House for less than half a year, and it already seems like he’s just not cut out for the job. More specifically, he’s not cut out for facing the media like a professional, and journalists are quickly growing sick of it — and now they’re publicly calling him out for using childish antics to avoid facing any confrontation like a grown-up.
New York Times’ congressional correspondent Annie Karni finally took aim at Johnson’s nonsense in a blistering piece, in which she pointed out that before the Republican House rep. took the Speakership position, he was known for being a rather chatty congressman.
However, now that he’s staring down the barrel of a government shutdown, pressure from his own political party, and the ever-present Donald Trump breathing down his neck on things like border patrol, suffice it to say that Mike Johnson has clammed up, and he’ll do basically anything to avoid actually having to discuss any of this with a member of the media. Even if, as Karni pointed out, his antics teeter on the precipice of absolute ridiculousness.
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“After spending less than six minutes answering questions at a news conference, Mr. Johnson shut down reporters’ shouted questions with a silent cue, like a cab light switched off, signaling he was no longer available: He held his smartphone phone to his ear and speed-walked out of sight,” the Times reporter wrote.
“It is a ploy that Mr. Johnson has used frequently to dodge questions since the fall.”
Karni ultimately called the John phone fiasco “One of the most common tactics in a member of Congress’s playbook … talking, or pretending to talk, on the phone.”
“These days, as he strides through the Capitol from his office to the House floor and back, Mr. Johnson’s preferred posture is inaccessible. And it most often involves using his iPhone as his buffer.”
“Is it a fake phone call, a sick kid, or the president of the United States?” the reporter rhetorically questioned. “It’s hard for journalists to tell who, if anyone, is on the other end of the line — and that is the point,” before going on to note that on the rare occasions that Johnson doesn’t have his electronic devices readily available, he will resort to taking notes or reviewing a newspaper as he walks away from the gaggle of reporters gathered around him.
Read the full New York Times report here.
Featured image via Flickr/Gage Skidmore, under Creative Commons license 2.0
