U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday that “when the message goes out constantly that the election of Donald Trump would be a threat to democracy and that the republic would end, it heats up the environment.”
Johnson called for lowering violent political rhetoric even as he blamed the rhetoric of Democrats for causing a young white, conservative Republican man to attempt the assassination of the conservative candidate for president.
Hypocrisy leaks all over Johnson’s statement. Hypocrisy, to be clear is pretense. When a person claims to have standards or beliefs to which he doesn’t conform, he is a hypocrite. Johnson qualifies, by definition, as a hypocrite. Once again.
“Speaker Johnson seems oblivious to the messages of his candidate, Donald Trump, and his Republican Party.”
Speaker Johnson seems oblivious to the messages of his candidate, Donald Trump, and his Republican Party. Sounding like hellfire and damnation revival preachers, Trump and his surrogates have degraded, demeaned and eviscerated President Bill Clinton, President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and Democratic women in Congress. Democrats have been labeled “demons,” “enemies of the nation” and worse.
And this rhetoric has been almost Sunday school-like when compared to the hateful rhetoric aimed at LBGTQ Americans.
Hateful rhetoric about LGBTQ people
Rebecca Barrett-Fox has catalogued examples of the hateful anti-gay rhetoric of conservatives in her work, God Hates: Westboro Baptist Church, American Nationalism, and the Religious Right.
Paul Cameron, anti-gay psychologist and founder of the Family Research Institute, argues: “Homosexuals are now more than nonproductive ‘sexual bums.’ They are recruiting others, forming communities, beginning to mock and undermine the old pieties of loyalty to family, country and God. They have redefined ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and view with contempt the idea that honest work and sex within marriage are communal acts necessary for human survival.”
In one of the most disgusting, ignorant statements ever made by a preacher, North Carolina independent Baptist Charles Worley dared suggest: “I figured a way out, a way to get rid of all the lesbians and queers but I couldn’t get it pass the Congress — build a great big large fence, 50 or a 100 mile long. Put all the lesbians in there, fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. And have that fence electrified so they can’t get out. And you know what? In a few years they will die out. You know why? They can’t reproduce.”
And there’s the most violent anti-gay statement on record from the pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church of Tempe, Ariz., Steven Anderson: “Turn to Leviticus 20:12, because I actually discovered the cure for AIDS. … Everybody’s talking about having an AIDS-free world by 2020. … Look, we can have an AIDS-free world by Christmas … because if you executed the homos like God recommends, you wouldn’t have all this AIDS running rampant.”
Donald Trump mocks U.S. President Joe Biden while speaking during a Get Out The Vote rally at Coastal Carolina University on February 10, 2024, in Conway, South Carolina. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
Degrading rhetoric aimed at women
Perhaps Johnson has forgotten Trump’s degrading language toward women. In response to remarks Cher made about him, Trump said, “I knocked the shit out of her” on Twitter. He claimed New York Times columnist Gail Collins has “the face of a dog.”
“Perhaps Johnson has forgotten Trump’s degrading language toward women.”
At a state party convention of California Republicans, Trump said, “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know? And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”
Mocking people is a Trump favorite. He thinks he is Rodney Dangerfield, but he’s a danger to decency and decorum.
Trump’s degrading remarks about E. Jean Carroll already have cost him $90 million and there may be more civil judgments to come. “This woman is not a believable person,” Trump said. He labeled Carroll as “Miss Bergdorf Goodman” and said, “I have no idea who she is” even though he was convicted of assaulting her.
Trump swears he did not have sex with porn star Stormy Daniels even though he paid $130,000 to keep her silent. Trump said, “Great, now I can go after Horseface and her 3rd rate lawyer in the Great State of Texas. She will confirm the letter she signed! She knows nothing about me, a total con!”
“Whether it’s the Mar-a-Lago raid, or the ‘Unselect Committee’ hoax, the perfect Georgia phone call — it was absolutely perfect — or the Stormy ‘horse face’ Daniels extortion plot, they’re all sick, and it’s fake news,” Trump said. “Our enemies are desperate to stop us because they know that we are the only ones who can stop them and they know it very strongly.”
Shaming rhetoric of racism
Racism frequently punctuates Trump’s rhetoric even though he swears he is the “least racist person” in the world. Trump’s racism always has been implicit and at times explicit.
“Racism frequently punctuates Trump’s rhetoric even though he swears he is the ‘least racist person’ in the world.”
Ta Nehisi Coates says: “His political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that Black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. He fought to keep Blacks out of his buildings; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against ‘lazy’ Black employees. ‘Black guys counting my money! I hate it,’ Trump was once quoted as saying. ‘The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.’ When Obama produced his birth certificate, Trump claimed Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.”
The hypocrisy of Trump is off the charts here because Tony Schwartz. the ghost writer of Trump’s book The Art of the Deal testified, “I wrote the Art of the Deal, Donald Trump read it.”
Trump posted a series of racist tweets attacking Democratic women of color in Congress: likely the progressive “squad” of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley (although he didn’t name any of them explicitly). In the tweets, Trump suggested they “go back” to “the crime-infested places from which they came.” All four women are American citizens, and three of the four were born in the United States (Omar was born in Somalia and became a U.S. citizen in 2000).
The way he refers to minorities screams racism. He calls them “the Blacks,” “the Hispanics,” “the Mexicans,” and “the Muslims.” In a tweet, he repeated false white supremacist claims that Blacks committed 81% of the homicides of whites. When a judge of Hispanic descent was put in charge of the Trump University fraud case, Trump said the judge could not be objective because he was “Mexican.” The judge was born in Indiana. Trump went on to claim a Muslim judge could not be objective if ruling on his case.
Vitriolic rhetoric defines today’s conservatives
Speaker Johnson, suffering from political amnesia, doesn’t remember how the Republican Party turned from “good-faith participation” in democracy 25 years ago as they followed the “bomb-throwing” rhetorical renegade Newt Gingrich where American politicians never had gone before. Dana Milbank traces the shift in Republican ethos to Gingrich, who “set a course toward the ruinous politics of today.”
Has Johnson also forgotten the Republican Party has become authoritarian over the last 25 years, destroying truth, decency, patriotism, national unity, racial progress, their own party and U.S. democracy?
“Trump has extended the flaming rhetoric of Gingrich to a fundamental nihilism.”
Trump has extended the flaming rhetoric of Gingrich to a fundamental nihilism with a “destructive spirit of anarchy and chaos.” He has operated as a political disrupter promising a kind of salvation by demolition, according to Robert Ivie.
Trump disgorges vitriolic rhetoric from his mouth daily and throughout the night he dumps his darkness on social media. He characteristically speaks the language of war.
In a rhetorical critique of a Trump rally speech, Ivie points out when he talked about the war on drugs, Trump demonized the Democrats: “They don’t mind drugs pouring in. They don’t mind, excuse me, MS-13 coming in.”
Democrats in Congress are “rudderless,” Trump says. Their leader, Sen. Schumer, is “a bad leader.” His policies are “hurting innocent Americans.” He is “weak on crime.” He is “leading the Democrats to doom.”
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., speaks at the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wis., on Monday, July 15, 2024. (Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)
What nerve
Speaker Johnson has a lot of nerve to suggest lowering the temperature when he is the legislative leader of the party promoting political mistrust, animosity and revenge, while ravaging democratic norms and values, trampling on free speech, undermining civic culture and inhibiting serious debate on the serious issues facing our country.
“Conservatives have been going on and on until doomsday with a dark, apocalyptic rhetoric riddled with contempt, revenge and hatred.”
Johnson piously intones, “America awakens to a rather surreal morning. … We can’t go on like this as a society.” And yet conservatives have been going on and on until doomsday with a dark, apocalyptic rhetoric riddled with contempt, revenge and hatred.
On the opening night of the Republican National Convention, Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin added more fuel to the flames of violent rhetoric. He said: “Today’s Democrat agenda, their policies, are a clear and present danger to Americans, to our institutions, our values, and our people. This radical agenda includes biological males competing against girls and the sexualization and indoctrination of our children.”
This was no casual reference by Johnson. His “clear and present danger” statement has historical precedents: Schenck v. United States. In 1919 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the First Amendment protections of freedom of speech were not absolute. Two New York socialists, convicted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for urging resistance to military draft during World War I appealed on First Amendment grounds to the Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the court majority, rejected their arguments.
“The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic,” he said. The “question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”
Another important Supreme Court case was Gitlow v. the State of New York. A Socialist politician, Benjamin Gitlow, was arrested for the publication of a “left-wing manifesto.” The Supreme Court upheld the conviction and ruled the government may suppress or punish speech that directly advocates the unlawful overthrow of the government.
Senator Johnson chose “clear and present danger” carefully. He is accusing Democrats of advocating the unlawful overthrow of the government. In light of January 6, this is a particularly pernicious accusation.
After the speech, Johnson incredulously demonstrated there is no bottom too low for hypocrisy.
He later told PBS Newshour he had intended to read a different version of the speech that called for unity, and that the teleprompter had loaded an older version of his speech.
As to why Johnson didn’t change the speech as he was delivering it, he claimed he didn’t know how to make changes without confusing the teleprompter. In other words, the man claims he is incapable of offering extemporaneous remarks as a political speaker.
Enemies of the state
Across the board, with or without teleprompters, the demonization of Democrats will continue unabated in the midst of tepid calls for unity. Until we grasp the Republican devotion to the notion that Democrats are not fellow Americans but enemies of the state, we will make no progress in our political morass.
Republicans and their evangelical supporters will not prove equal to the task of a rhetoric lacking in meanness, ugliness and awfulness. They have supported Trump as he grumbled, growled and erupted in profanity-laced hate speeches, and they will uphold him forever.
They see themselves as the spiritual warriors and they see Trump as their Moses. Like Aaron and Hur holding up the hands of Moses, “one on one side, and the other on the other side” in the battle against Amalek, they will be Trump’s advocate through thick and thin including convictions, defeats and victories.
Hypocrites live in a house with no mirrors. Self-reflection becomes impossible, repentance a lost word. In the end, they will simply be worn out hypocrites holding up the clenched fist of a tired old warrior.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer who serves in New York state and Louisiana. He is the author of 10 books, including his latest, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy.
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