Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson refused to condemn suggestions by former President Donald Trump and his son Eric that Democrats are to blame for the recent assassination attempts on his life.
Appearing on ABC’s This Week, the election conspiracist and leading GOP congressman also declined to say that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
“They impeached him twice and then, guys, they tried to kill him, they tried to kill him,” Eric Trump told a Saturday rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, held at the site where Trump was shot in July. “And it’s because of the Democratic Party. They can’t do anything right.”
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His father echoed those remarks in his own address. “Over the past eight years, those who want to stop us from achieving this future have slandered me, impeached me, indicted me, tried to throw me off the ballot and—who knows—maybe even tried to kill me,” he said.
Asked by This Week host George Stephanopoulos if the two were right to suggest Democrats were behind the efforts to assassinate Trump, Johnson dodged.
“I don’t think they’re saying that the Democratic Party tried an assassination attempt,” he replied. “I think what they’re alluding to is what they’ve all been saying: they have got to turn the rhetoric down.”
Johnson added that “the leading Democrats in this country… have gone out and said that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy, that the republic will end if he’s reelected” and claimed, in doing so, they “have incited dangerous people to do dangerous things.”
He refused to answer Stephanopoulos’ follow-up question about whether the specific remarks by Trump and his son were appropriate, claiming he didn’t know the full context of the remarks, even though ABC had just played the clips for him, and started talking about the Pennsylvania event’s crowd size.
When Stephanopoulos tried in vain, one final time, clearly reading the transcript of Eric Trump’s remarks to Johnson, the speaker again avoided answering. “George, George, I’m not going to parse the language of what people say at rallies,” he said. “I could give you pages and pages of crazy comments by the leading Democrats in this country.”
The ABC host noted to Johnson “it’s very clear you’re not gonna condemn the baseless suggestion that Democrats are behind the assassination attempt on Donald Trump” before moving on.
His next question, about whether the election conspiracist Johnson would acknowledge whether President Joe Biden won the 2020 election returned an equally evasive response.
“This is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans, it’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said. “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future.”
Asked if he would certify this year’s election if Kamala Harris wins, Johnson would only say he intends to “follow the Constitution.” He would not give a straight yes or no answer.
