The conservative Southern Baptist speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, who sought to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, now says it is “God’s will” that Joe Biden is president.
That didn’t sit well with another of Donald Trump’s chief apologists, Steven Bannon, who responded that Speaker of the House Mike Johnson must have lost his mind.
“Have you lost your freaking mind? This election was stolen. Don’t, don’t start giving me. Don’t go, don’t be a theologian. I don’t need a theologian, I need a speaker of the House,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast. “That’s what the country needs. Joe Biden’s not a legitimate president of the United States, note to the speaker, so no, God did not raise him up.”
“I don’t need a theologian, I need a speaker of the House.”
Bannon reiterated the far-right Republican talking point that Biden is “an illegitimate president.”
Bannon, the indicted, convicted and pardoned former adviser to Trump, was responding to comments Johnson made at the House GOP leadership’s weekly press conference Jan. 16. There, Johnson was asked whether he believes Biden’s presidency was “God’s will.”
His response: “Oh, I know where you’re going with this. OK, so I said in my speech, before I took the gavel, that look, I’m a Bible-believing Christian, right? Bible-believing Christian (who) believes what the Bible says, right? The Bible says that God is the one that raises up people in authority. I believe God is sovereign. By the way, so did the founders. I quoted the Declaration of Independence pledge that our rights don’t come from government, they’ve come from God, and we’re made in his image.
“Everybody’s made the same. We all are given equal rights and value, and that’s something that we defend. So, if you believe all those things, then you believe that God is the one that allows people to be raised in authority.”
Biden’s presidency “must have been God’s will then.”
Johnson is a Southern Baptist inerrantist who reads the Bible literally. Romans 13:1 says, “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.”
When Trump was elected president in 2020, Christian conservatives like Johnson claimed not only it was God’s will but saw Trump as a particular figure of God’s righteousness and judgment. Some portrayed him as various biblical characters ordained by God to punish the wicked.
Johnson and other allies of Trump are repeating and enlarging those claims of divine intent in their support for Trump in the 2024 election.
“A nation makes a decision collectively because we’re given the free will to do that,” Johnson said. “And I think we’re going to make a much better choice as a country coming up in this election cycle.”
Then he added: “We’re very much looking forward to that regime change.”
Johnson’s use of the term “regime change” — often used to describe anti-democratic overthrows of governments — caught the attention of some Trump critics, who associated the speaker’s words with Trump’s own repeated threats to act as an authoritarian dictator if elected to office again. Trump has called for “termination” of the U.S. Constitution and has said he would use the office to persecute and prosecute his political enemies, including Biden.
Speaker Johnson was among the 147 congressional Republicans who voted against certifying some presidential electors on Jan. 6, 2021, in defiance of the will of voters and of legal processes.
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