Borowitz Report's Traitor of the Week: Mike Johnson

[FakeNoose]

Link: https://www.borowitzreport.com/p/traitor-of-the-week-quisling-no-5 (for paid subscribers only)

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You probably know Rep. Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) as Speaker of the House. Mike Johnson sees himself somewhat differently: as the man God chose, out of the eight billion people roaming the Earth, to be the New Moses. How, you might wonder, did MJ come to this odd conclusion? Did he happen to catch the 1956 film The Ten Commandments and decide that he and its star, Charlton Heston, had more in common than their staunch opposition to background checks for assault-rifle fanciers?

No, he got the news of his selection direct from the Almighty. Johnson revealed the details of this heavenly Zoom call in a speech on December 7, 2023—a date that will live in insanity. Speaking to National Association of Christian Lawmakers (NACL), he announced, “The Lord told me very clearly to prepare. OK, prepare for what? I don’t know. ‘We’re coming to a Red Sea moment.’”

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And yet just one month earlier, in a far less Mosaic move, he appeared outside a Manhattan courthouse to demonstrate his solidarity with a criminal defendant who landed in hot water by breaking at least two of the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not commit adultery (with a porn star); and Thou shalt not bear false witness (by falsifying business records).

“This is the fifth week that President Trump has been in court for this sham of a trial,” Johnson fulminated. “President Trump is innocent of these charges.” As we now know, the jury of said sham trial ultimately disagreed, finding Trump guilty of 34 felonies. But let’s leave that aside. Given Johnson’s long record of performative piety, his display of support for a man who had broken his marital vows with an adult film artiste named Stormy raised a few eyebrows.

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But there was a time—in those halcyon days before Trump became the leader of the death cult known as the Republican Party—when MJ was more than happy to comment on that. When Trump was running for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, Johnson, much like his fellow quisling Lindsey Graham, questioned the reality show host’s fitness for the Oval Office.

“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Johnson, then a Louisiana state rep, wrote on Facebook. “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief… I just don’t think he has the demeanor to be President.”

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So why, then, does Johnson persist in enabling the primordial slime occupying the Oval Office? If we take Mike’s ambition out of the equation—a task that would require an industrial forklift—one could argue that he sees Donald Trump as the best vehicle for advancing the movement that he, as New Moses, holds so dear: Christian Nationalism.

- more at link, for paid subscribers -

Excerpted from Borowitz's Sunday Read column, which is his longer, non-satirical essay once per week.