Speaker Johnson Calls it Faith. It’s Temerity Pure and Simple.

Trump Is Only Part Of The Problem.

The most dangerous man in Washington carries a twelve-year-old’s theology in a fifty-two-year-old’s body, wielding a gavel he believes is just divine. Mike Johnson—this peculiar specimen of American democratic decay—built his entire worldview on a child’s magical thinking about his father’s survival, and now he’s dismantling the very systems that actually saved Patrick Johnson’s life while crediting an imaginary friend for the work of trauma surgeons.

Here’s the primal scene of Johnson’s political origin story, the one he trots out like a circus pony whenever he needs to justify his theocratic aspirations: 1984, a cold storage facility in Shreveport explodes, his firefighter father suffers burns over 80% of his body, and twelve-year-old Mike decides that his dad’s survival is a miracle from God. Not the miracle of modern medicine, not the burn unit protocols developed through decades of research, not the Medicaid that helped pay for it all—no, little Mike looked at skin grafts and morphine drips and saw the hand of the Almighty. This is the intellectual foundation of the man second in line to the presidency: a child’s inability to distinguish between medical science and magic, crystallized into an adult’s political philosophy.

The irony would be literature if it weren’t so deadly. Johnson now oversees a government shutdown that’s stripped funding from the very burn centers that save people like his father. He champions Medicaid cuts that would have bankrupted the Johnson family in 1984. He votes to slash SNAP benefits that keep families fed during medical crises. The “BIG Beautiful Bill” he and Trump rammed through Congress—Trump’s monument to tax cuts for billionaires—has gutted precisely the social safety net that caught his own family when they were falling. But Johnson doesn’t see social programs; he sees divine providence. He doesn’t see doctors and nurses working eighteen-hour shifts; he sees angels. This is what happens when you let someone who can’t distinguish between science and superstition control $6 trillion in federal spending.

Let’s be clear about what actually saved Patrick Johnson’s life, since his son seems incapable of grasping it: socialist medicine. Yes, socialist—that word Republicans spit out like rancid meat. The Shreveport Fire Department that employed him? Government workers. The emergency responders? Government funded. The burn unit? Subsidized by federal programs. The disability payments that kept the family afloat? Government again. The entire apparatus that prevented Mike Johnson from becoming an orphan was built by the New Deal and Great Society programs his political career is devoted to destroying.

But Johnson’s intellectual poverty runs deeper than mere ingratitude. He literally—and I mean literally—blamed the teaching of evolution for the Columbine massacre. Not alienation, not gun access, not mental health failures—Darwin. He stood at podiums and argued with a straight face that natural selection curricula create school shooters. This is the analytical framework of America’s Speaker: a connect-the-dots coloring book where every line leads back to his provincial interpretation of a Bronze Age text. He claimed abortion caused the 2008 financial crisis because it reduced the workforce—as if women are primarily uterine manufacturing units for capitalism, as if Goldman Sachs collapsed because America ran low on babies.

The Alliance Defending Freedom years reveal the sadistic core beneath the Sunday school veneer. This wasn’t passive bigotry; Johnson actively fought to criminalize private sexual conduct between consenting adults. He filed briefs arguing states should be able to imprison gay people—not for public acts, not for harm to others, but for existing in their own bedrooms. He defended Louisiana’s ban on same-sex marriage with arguments so legally specious they wouldn’t pass muster in a mock trial. He represented a Kentucky theme park that required employees to sign statements denouncing homosexuality to get tax breaks—literally using Caesar’s money to render unto a very specific interpretation of God.

His connection to the New Apostolic Reformation makes conventional religious extremism look quaint. These people believe in “Seven Mountain Mandate”—that Christians must conquer seven spheres of influence including government, education, and media. They held ceremonies “divorcing” Baal (yes, the ancient Canaanite deity) from America. They speak in tongues at political rallies and claim God tells them election results before votes are counted. Johnson doesn’t just associate with these people; he’s their congressional apostle, their inside man who made it all the way to the Speaker’s chair while everyone was distracted by Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Jewish space laser theories.

The 2020 election revealed Johnson’s true nature: a seditious lawyer with a mediocre mind and a messiah complex. While Rudy Giuliani was leaking hair dye and Sidney Powell was channeling Hugo Chávez’s ghost, Johnson was in his office crafting the pseudo-intellectual framework for overturning democracy. His legal theory—that state legislatures could simply ignore their own voters—was so absurd that even Trump-appointed judges laughed it out of court. Yet he got 126 Republicans to sign on, proving that the entire party would follow anyone.

What Johnson represents isn’t Christianity—Christ threw the money changers out of the temple; Johnson invites them to write legislation. Christ said to render unto Caesar; Johnson believes he IS Caesar, appointed by God to rule. Christ healed the sick for free; Johnson would have demanded their insurance cards. This is Christianity as processed through American capitalism and white nationalism until it emerges as something monstrous: a prosperity gospel where God always wants tax cuts for billionaires and deportations for immigrants, where divine will conveniently aligns with Koch Industries’ lobbying agenda.

The current shutdown theater reveals the moral vacuum at Johnson’s core. He’s holding the government hostage to fund Trump’s “BIG Beautiful Bill”—a transfer of wealth from working families to oligarch’s. Meanwhile, burn victims like his father wait months for disability determinations. Medicaid recipients lose coverage. Food stamp recipients stare at empty pantries. Johnson looks at this suffering and sees... what? God’s plan? Divine fiscal responsibility? Or does he simply not see it at all, blinded by the same childish theology that turned his father’s medical rescue into a Sunday school miracle?

The establishment Republicans who elevated him after McCarthy’s fall knew exactly what they were getting: a man who confuses competence with salvation, who mistakes parliamentary procedure for divine providence. They needed someone stupid enough to believe their tax cuts help working families but smart enough to schedule votes correctly. Johnson is perfectly calibrated for this role—just intelligent enough to be useful, just fanatical enough to be reliable, just mediocre enough to never threaten anyone above him in the donor hierarchy.

I suppose the tragedy isn’t that Johnson lacks the intelligence to understand what actually saved his father—it’s that his willful ignorance now threatens everyone else’s parents, everyone else’s families, everyone else’s futures. He’s pulling up the ladder his own family climbed, burning the safety net that caught them, all while praising God for blessings that were actually delivered by union firefighters and trauma nurses and the Democratic legislators who built America’s social insurance systems.

This is American decline: not invasion or collapse but a slow surrender to magical thinking, where grown men in positions of enormous power operate on the intellectual level of children afraid of the dark. Johnson looks at climate change and sees God’s will. He looks at mass shootings and sees insufficient prayer. He looks at poverty and sees moral failure. He looks at the actual machinery of government—the thing that saved his father’s life—and sees an impediment to divine will.

The final insult is that Johnson genuinely believes he’s doing God’s work as he strips healthcare from the sick, food from the hungry, hope from the desperate. This isn’t hypocrisy—it’s something worse. It’s the complete cognitive failure of someone who never grew beyond a twelve-year-old’s understanding of cause and effect, now armed with the power to impose that stunted worldview on 330 million Americans. He stands at the Speaker’s rostrum, gavel in hand, presiding over the systematic dismantling of every system that actually saves lives, while crediting an invisible friend for work done by human hands and human hearts and human intelligence.

Patrick Johnson didn’t survive because of prayer. He survived because of people—flawed, mortal people who studied and trained and fought to pull him back from the edge. His son learned exactly the wrong lesson from that salvation, and now we’re all paying the price for his theological malpractice. The doctors and nurses who saved Patrick Johnson must watch in horror as his son methodically destroys the very foundations of the medical system that made that salvation possible, all while praising heaven for earth’s work.

This is Mike Johnson’s America: where magical thinking replaces policy, where theology trumps democracy, where a child’s misunderstanding of his father’s salvation becomes the blueprint for everyone else’s damnation. Temerity. Great word. Fits with Johnson - then again, so does turd.