The night before Speaker Mike Johnson defied the hard-right wing of his party and brought up a bill to send more than $60 billion in aid to Ukraine, he spent a mostly sleepless night in a luxury hotel suite overlooking the Potomac River, bracing for a mutiny that would end his speakership.
“He was in turmoil,” his wife, Kelly Johnson, recalled of that night last spring, in an interview conducted last fall. “We assumed we were done. I was saying, ‘Well, it’s been great. It’s been a nice, but short little ride.’ We thought we were going home.”
Mr. Johnson spent the night praying in the living room of their suite at the Pendry. In the morning, he told his wife he was going to do what he thought was right, regardless of the personal political cost. He would move ahead with legislation to continue funding Kyiv’s fight against Russian aggression, telling colleagues that he wanted to be on the right side of history.
Less that one year later, Mr. Johnson still has his job and has made a 180-degree conversion on Ukraine. His reversal reflects a broader Republican capitulation to the president even from some of Congress’s most vocal Russia hawks as Mr. Trump pursues warmer relations with President Vladimir V. Putin, blames Ukraine for the conflict and labels its president — but not Mr. Putin — “a dictator.”
The new alignment was on display during an explosive meeting in the Oval Office on Friday in which Mr. Trump berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, ultimately kicking him out of the White House in a dramatic rupture in relations. Mr. Johnson responded hours after the meeting concluded by cheering on Mr. Trump.
“Thanks to President Trump — the days of America being taken advantage of and disrespected are OVER,” he wrote on social media, adding, “What we witnessed in the Oval Office today was an American President putting America first.”
It is a particularly striking turn for the speaker, who less than a year ago was so sold on the worthiness of Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression that he was willing to lose his job to ensure continued financial support for it, in what the president now says was a terrible deal for the United States.
Back then, Mr. Johnson engaged in highly secretive talks with top Biden administration officials to figure out how to salvage the aid, going to previously unreported lengths to keep those negotiations under wraps. Now, he is siding with Mr. Trump as he blames those same officials for causing the war and botching the American response.
The Republican speaker doggedly took on naysayers in his own ranks last year, privately making the very arguments in favor of Kyiv that Mr. Trump is now rejecting as he resets American policy toward Russia and Ukraine.
This account of those secrets talks and internal conversations is drawn from interviews conducted last fall with people familiar with them, most of whom recounted them on the condition of anonymity for a forthcoming book, “Mad House: How Donald Trump, MAGA Mean Girls, a Former Used Car Salesman, a Florida Nepo Baby, and a Man With Rats in His Walls Broke Congress.”
‘We’re Going to Start World War III.’
Mr. Johnson argues that his position has not changed a bit since last year, claiming that he was moving to shore up Ukraine’s standing so Mr. Trump could come in and end the war. But behind the scenes, he was making a much more sweeping case about the need for strong U.S. backing to thwart Mr. Putin’s march and keep peace in Europe.
In the days leading up to last year’s vote, he engaged in tense talks with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, who was threatening to oust him from his job if he allowed the Ukraine aid bill to come up.
In one such meeting, Ms. Greene warned Mr. Johnson that the classified intelligence he was relying on to justify sending the funds was exactly the kind of information that had led the United States to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that turned out not to have existed. She warned him to be skeptical of the material he was being “fed” from the intelligence community, because, she said, “they have goals.”
The level of distrust tested Mr. Johnson’s patience.
“What about Trump guys who say if we don’t do this, we’re going to start World War III?” Mr. Johnson asked her — referring to people like John Ratcliffe, Robert O’Brien, Mike Pompeo and Devin Nunes.
“They’re deep state, too,” Ms. Greene shot back. “Once you go to the intel space, you just sell your soul.”.
Wasn’t there anyone at all at the Pentagon whose word she trusted, Mr. Johnson asked. There was not, Ms. Greene responded, saying they all deserved the “deep state” moniker.
Mr. Johnson seethed and forced himself to remember the biblical admonition to be forgiving, even to one’s persecutors.
He asked Ms. Greene whether she had ever served in the military, or visited Europe. She responded that she had not. But she still wanted him to take her gut feeling over all of the intelligence he was being shown? Mr. Johnson was incredulous.
“The American people know,” she shot back. “And you ought to know, if you weren’t such a coward.”
The meeting lasted 90 minutes, an investment of time that Mr. Johnson made because he had to.
At the time, any single member of the House had the power to bring up a motion to oust him from his job, and he knew that Ms. Greene was serious about her threat. Everyone from Mr. Trump on down was pleading with Ms. Greene not to do it, but there was no political downside to her forging ahead.
So Mr. Johnson needed to make Ms. Greene feel heard. He would vent to donors and colleagues that he spent half his days as speaker and the other half as a mental health counselor. Because of his tiny majority, he explained, he could not afford to be at odds with anyone. So he spent countless hours “on the couch” with restive Republicans, listening and gently encouraging them to get back on the team.
Mr. Johnson viewed Ms. Greene, in particular, as more sympathetic to Mr. Putin than anyone he knew. He felt strongly that what he was trying to do was right and some days, he would come home and joke with his wife: “Sure, you’re supposed to bless those who persecute you, but every hour of every day?”
Mr. Johnson wanted to convince Ms. Greene and other Republican holdouts that the briefings he sat through were accurate. Mr. Putin was a threat who could potentially steamroll across Europe after taking Ukraine and threaten one of America’s NATO allies. To those who did not agree, he offered briefings on the intelligence that had persuaded him that Ukraine needed American help. No one ever showed up to receive them.
Mr. Johnson ultimately moved the bill and survived politically, thanks to Democrats blocking Ms. Greene’s motion to oust him. He was elected again as speaker in January, with a hefty assist from Mr. Trump.
Late-Night Negotiating at the Dog Park
Mr. Johnson’s current stance is the one that many people expected of him when the little-known Louisiana lawmaker was elected speaker last year.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, then the minority leader, was concerned when Mr. Johnson, a third-term congressman he had never heard of, was chosen to lead the House. Mr. McConnell was staking his legacy on backing Ukraine’s fight against Russia and he was urging the inexperienced speaker to simply put a bill on the floor and see if it had the votes to pass.
“It’s going to take quite a bit of time,” Mr. Johnson told Mr. McConnell. “You’re going to have to trust me on this.”
The problem was Mr. McConnell didn’t, really. He assumed Mr. Johnson, a red-state lawmaker who in the past had voted against aid to Ukraine, would buckle under pressure from the far right.
What he did not know at the time was that Mr. Johnson was deep into talks with top Biden administration national security officials about how to make it work. He held secret conversations with Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser; Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state; and Steve Ricchetti, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s main conduit to Capitol Hill.
Paranoid that the hard right would discover their talks and tank them, Mr. Johnson’s staff tried to put nothing in writing and avoided meeting during work hours. His chief of staff, Hayden Haynes, would sometimes meet Shuwanza Goff, the Biden White House’s director of legislative affairs, at a dog park in their neighborhood at night to trade folders of proposals, as if they were characters in the TV spy show “The Americans.”
It took Mr. Johnson almost two months to get there, but he eventually did.
Last year, Mr. Zelensky singled out Mr. Johnson for praise, saying that his decision to move forward with Ukraine aid was “a show of leadership and strength of the United States.”
Rationalizing a Turnabout
These days, Mr. Johnson has been echoing a Kremlin talking point embraced by Mr. Trump, raising concerns about the fact that Mr. Zelensky has not held an election during the war.
“We want to get back to free and fair elections there,” he said. Mr. Putin has been using the absence of an election during the conflict to cast doubt on Mr. Zelensky’s legitimacy.
Mr. Johnson argues that he never changed his stance on Ukraine, defending his decision to send aid to Kyiv as a move aimed at setting up Mr. Trump for success so he could forge a peace deal to end the conflict.
“It put Ukraine in the position where they are right now, to be in a posture where a peace negotiation can take place,” Mr. Johnson said recently. “I knew when President Trump was elected, he would be the changing agent, he would be the force who would come in and move both of those parties to the table.”
And recently it has been Ms. Greene who has taken a victory lap.
On social media this week, she posted a New York Post front page from last year that referred to her as “Moscow Marjorie” and pictured her wearing a fur hat with a communist seal.
“Badge of honor!” she commented.
