House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) revealed Wednesday that he’s been speaking “pretty frequently” with GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump about legislation that would send aid to Ukraine and address the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, where House Republicans are pushing for stricter measures.
Johnson spoke with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, who began the interview by saying that she too had just talked over the phone with Trump about the situation.
“He said he had spoken to you about this deal and that he is against it, and he urged you to be against this deal,” said Ingraham, adding that Trump was “extremely adamant about that.”
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Ingraham seemed to be fully on board with Trump, telling Johnson that the former president “knows how to do this enforcement stuff—you don’t need some new bill coming out of the Senate to get the border enforced.”
Johnson said that Trump “isn’t wrong.”
“He and I have been talking about this pretty frequently. I talked to him the night before last about the same subject,” he said.
During a meeting with President Joe Biden Wednesday, Johnson said House Republicans would balk at a proposed immigration deal by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to send Ukraine aid unless Democrats sign off on tougher immigration policies than the ones currently proposed.
Johnson told Ingraham that he hasn’t seen what the Democratic-controlled Senate has proposed.
“We don’t have the text of whatever the Senate has cooked up yet. And so we have to reserve judgment, I think, to see what comes out of it. It doesn’t sound good at the outset,” he said.
During his meeting with Johnson, Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Biden “discussed the strategic consequences of inaction for Ukraine, the United States and the world,” according to a White House statement.
“He was clear: Congress’s continued failure to act endangers the United States’ national security, the NATO Alliance and the rest of the free world,” it continued, adding that the president also “made clear that we must act now to address the challenges at the border.”
