Strobe lights, heavy bass, top-shelf drugs, lingerie-clad revelers gyrating in lustful ecstasy—at first glance, a kinky, decadent rave scene feels far from the 19th-century world of Edgar Allan Poe. But in Netflix’s adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, it’s just one set piece that works to cleverly bring the author’s work into contemporary times.

Mike Flanagan’s eight-episode anthology series draws upon multiple short stories, remixing its source material in seemingly unfaithful ways. Take the titular Ushers. As originally written by Poe, Roderick Usher is a sickly man afraid of his own shadow who lives in a dilapidated home with his sister, Madeline, a thin, weak woman who seems to “care about nothing.” But Flanagan transforms the wan duo into bespoke-suited industry titans. He styles his Roderick Usher (played by Bruce Greenwood) closer to Logan Roy, as a silver-haired patriarch with six children who runs a pharmaceutical conglomerate that peddles addictive painkillers. Meanwhile, Madeline (Mary McDonnell) is transformed into a narrow-eyed ambition machine—a woman who cares about everything. This doesn’t even begin to cover the abundant differences between Poe’s stories and Flanagan’s series when it comes to time period, cast size, and story arc.

But what’s notable about the Netflix show isn’t just the invented plotlines or its fresh take on Poe’s characters. If anything, Flanagan gets away with all this reimagining because he preserves what is arguably the most crucial element of Poe’s work: its Gothic mood. Even when portraying scenarios outside of Poe’s purview—for example, a Black lesbian scientist managing millions in biotech funding or a redhead Gwyneth Paltrow wannabe trying to launch a wellness empire—Flanagan imbues each episode with an atmosphere of dread and gloom that mirrors Poe.

In the short story “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe spends the bulk of his time describing the castle in which Prince Prospero and his courtiers wall themselves off from the diseased public. “But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held,” the author writes, pulling the reader away from a disastrous ball held by Prospero and toward a lengthy description of seven gaudy, bizarre rooms in his castle. He devotes nearly 300 words to an ebony clock. These diversions create, in Poe’s words, “disconcert and tremulousness.” The story ends with the death of all the revelers at the party, but by that point their dying seems like an afterthought. They’re mere casualties of the all-consuming unease that Poe has carefully conjured.

[Read: Edgar Allan Poe’s other obsession]

“The Tell-Tale Heart” works in a similar fashion, dedicating much of its length to the insane ravings of its narrator. “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I have been and am,” opens the story, immediately unsettling its reader. So effective is Poe at casting a spell of uncanny eerieness that the dismemberment that occurs in the story’s final moments feel like an inevitable outcome rather than a shocking climax. The poem “The Raven,” too, uses its narrator’s lamentation and the refrain of “Nevermore” to create a melancholy murkiness that eclipses Lenore and her death.

In The Fall of the House of Usher, Flanagan commits to mood with the same intensity, starting with the show’s look. This isn’t the well-lit Scandinavian horror of Ari Aster’s Midsommar; nor is it the campy baroque of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak. Flanagan applies a foggy, slate-colored palette to high-tension boardroom scenes and beautifully outfitted apartments alike, alternating it with the inky, claustrophobic darkness of the Usher family home’s living room: scenes in which Roderick Usher recounts the gruesome, untimely deaths of all his offspring while sitting across from Detective Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly). The effect is one of creeping doom that works much like Poe’s scene-setting in his short stories. Music is also central to Flanagan’s ode to Poe’s gothic sensibility: Lush strings strain across a scene of Madeline passing through a homeless encampment to visit a boarded-up bar. Metallic thundering echoes in scenes of Leo Usher (Rahul Kohli) being slowly driven mad by the specter of a black cat.

Counterintuitively, by sticking so closely to Poe’s emotional tenor, Flanagan is free to inject something of his own: a sense of moral outrage. Poe’s original works aren’t parables with clear lessons. In the hands of another writer, “The Masque of the Red Death” might have been a scathing takedown of the powerful who shield their eyes from the suffering of the poor. But Poe dwells more on feeling than fable, leaving the work of assigning meaning entirely to the reader. For example, in his story about the Ushers, how these scions of a once-wealthy family made their money, why they own their decrepit mansion—all of this is beyond Poe’s interest.

But in Flanagan’s retelling, the Ushers are a clear analogue to the Sackler family. They’ve made their billions off Ligadone, a fast-acting opioid marketed as nonaddictive while causing widespread dependency and death, much like OxyContin. The horrific demise of the Usher children and the family’s downfall are the comeuppance for the greedy, destructive Roderick. Each episode, named after a different Poe work, follows a different Usher descendent, unraveling their particular pathology and tracing how their father’s actions have determined their fate. If Succession’s finale portrayed the mega-wealthy’s punishment by their private emotional torture, Flanagan gives us a story of one-percenters stalked by a supernatural arbiter of justice (played by a chameleonic Carla Gugino).

[Read: Pain Hustlers is a goofy celebration of greed]

The show tells the story not just of a crumbling home but of a ruined society, using Poe’s aura of fear and dread to point an accusatory finger at the rich and powerful who profit off the deaths of the masses. A good adaptation is faithful to the essence of the original material. A great adaptation manages to be faithful while using the original to build something new. In Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, the preservation of mood pays proper homage to the author’s words. The show’s social commentary, in turn, allows a retelling of an old story to resonate powerfully in our current moment.

Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman from Illinois, is best known for his service on the congressional committee that investigated the January 6 insurrection. He and Liz Cheney were the only two Republicans on that committee, and completely noncoincidentally, neither one is in Congress today. The new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is more typical of the House Republican caucus: He was a leader of the election deniers.

In his new book, Renegade: Defending Democracy and Liberty in Our Divided Country, Kinzinger details his manifold struggles: with his conscience, with his ambition, and, ultimately, with the Republicans who attempted to subvert the Constitution. A six-term congressman and an Air Force veteran, Kinzinger today is chastened but still somewhat hopeful—not hopeful about the short-term future of the Republican Party, but hopeful that pro-democracy voters are still sufficient in number to turn back the authoritarians.

I first met Kinzinger in 2014, when we were both members of the late Senator John McCain’s delegation to the Munich Security Conference. Also in that delegation were Senator Lindsey Graham and then-Representative Mike Pompeo, who later became Donald Trump’s CIA director and secretary of state.

[Peter Wehner: The man who refused to bow]

What follows is an edited and condensed transcript of a conversation I had with Kinzinger earlier this month on stage at the Democracy360 conference, sponsored by the Karsh Institute at the University of Virginia. We started by talking about that now-unlikely constellation of Republicans: Kinzinger, McCain, Graham, and Pompeo.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You guys were all in the same camp, the muscular internationalist Republicans. Two of you went one way, and two of you went another way. What happened?

Adam Kinzinger: Craven politics, craven power—that’s what it is. This is something I still try to grapple with every day, when I look back on January 6. I always thought everybody had a red line. Like, okay, we can play politics to a point, but there’s a red line we'll never cross. I’ve learned that’s not the case.

I’d say [we] are all still probably for a muscular foreign policy. The difference, though, between people that went one way or another is the recognition that U.S. foreign policy also means we have to have a healthy democracy at home, and that democracy-building overseas is fine, but having a strong democracy here, where people have faith in the voting system and faith that whoever gets the most votes will win, is just as important.

I think there are unfortunately too many people that got into the Trump sphere, that it  just became about power, identity, and not looking at the broader picture of your impact in this world.

Goldberg: So I want to stay on this for a while because I want you to name names.

Kinzinger: I can name names for an hour. A couple off the top of my head: One of the ones I’m most disappointed in generally is [former House Speaker] Kevin McCarthy, because I always thought that McCarthy had some version of a political soul. And I’ve come to realize that to him it was all about just the attainment of power. Somebody like Ted Cruz never surprised me. He’s always been a charlatan. But Lindsey Graham has also been a big disappointment to me, because I’ve traveled with Lindsey, leading congressional-delegation trips around the world. I always thought he and I were eye to eye on a lot of these foreign-policy issues. And to watch him so closely adopt and closely support Donald Trump, when Trump was doing exactly what Graham was preaching against just prior to Trump’s arrival on the scene, was a pretty disappointing moment.

[Read: ‘We put sharp knives on the hands of children’]

During this speaker fiasco, I would listen to names during the roll call, people like Mike McCaul, people like Mike Gallagher, and hear them say the name Jim Jordan and know, for a fact, they have no respect for Jim Jordan. But it’s all about that determination to survive politically. I have come to learn that people fear losing their identity and losing their tribe more than they come to fear death.

Goldberg: You saw Lindsey Graham throughout this process. What were conversations like? Did you ever just say, “Lindsey, what are you doing?”

Kinzinger: Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, our relationship hasn’t been that strong in the last few years, obviously. So I can’t say there were recent conversations, but it would just be like, “What’s going on? So Donald Trump did this thing. Why are you okay with that?”

People have given so much of their soul, of their values. They’ve compromised so much that at some point to stop compromising, or to recognize that this is a mistake and you need to correct course, would be an indictment against who you are and what you have done for the last four or five years. And I think Lindsey has been a victim of that. He liked the idea of being in the room with Donald Trump.

And I will tell you, I’ve met with Donald Trump a number of times; he is actually one of the most fun people to meet with, because he’s crazy, but it’s like a fun crazy. And he’s really good at drawing you in and making you feel seen at that moment, because he knows how to manipulate you. And it works perfectly with Lindsey. Lindsey says, “Now I have a seat at the table. I care about foreign policy.” But what he didn’t realize is that bargain came with selling who he was as a person.

Goldberg: If John McCain hadn’t died, would Graham have gone over?

Kinzinger: I don’t think so. I think Lindsey Graham needs a strong person to  mentor him or carry him, and it was John McCain. And when John McCain passed, the next guy, the strongman that Lindsey Graham was drawn to, was Donald Trump.

Goldberg: You got to Congress when the Republican Party is still the Republican Party you imagined it to be. One question that people like you always get is: Were you kidding yourself the whole time, or did something actually change?

Kinzinger: Looking back, I can say, “Oh, yeah, there were signs from the very beginning,” but I was part of the moderate Republicans, who constantly had this optimistic view that the Republican Party was this thing of smaller government, hope, opportunity, strong national defense, that kind of stuff. And I always just saw these elements of crazy nationalism, of authoritarianism, of racism exist in the party, but it’s a battle. And I’m fighting on the good side here to try to save the party. And then when Donald Trump came, we lost that fight.

I think the moment I started to realize, like, Okay, we have lost, was January 6. Before that point, I thought, Donald Trump is going to lose; people are going to wake up. Even on January 6 I said, “People are definitely going to wake up now.”

Now, with the benefit of time and looking back, I can say, “You know what? Those strains were there.” Some of them were hidden because it was not yet socially acceptable to say things like “Let’s throw out the Constitution.” I hear a lot of people say “You’re naive, because the Republican Party’s always been this way.” And inevitably those are people on the left that have always had a bad view of the GOP. I understand the viewpoint, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think there were a lot of really good factions in the GOP.

Goldberg: Explain the psychology there. What motivates this outburst of anger on the part of the voters that led to Trump’s triumph?

Kinzinger: I think the resentment came from Fox News and the right-wing-media echo chamber. Why do I say that? So this is something I take a lot of personal blame for being part of as well, although I think I did better than most.

In 2010, we learned that fear is the best way to raise money ever. If I send you an email and it says, “Dear Jeffrey, I want to lower tax rates and we need some help, blah, blah, blah,” you may give me money. But if I send you an email and it says, “Nancy Pelosi is trying to murder you and your family,” and in essence, I convince you that I’m the only thing standing between you and the life of you or your family, you’ll part with anything, including a significant part of your fixed income from Social Security. So in 2010, we learned this. And instead of using that kind of fire in a controlled way like politicians do, sometimes we let it burn. There was always this fire going, and we stoked it too far.

Goldberg: How do you reach people who haven’t been reached, to change their minds? There’s 30, 35 percent of the voters who are hard-core.

Kinzinger: Well, if the January 6 committee didn’t do it and the people still believe the scandals, I’m not sure that 35 percent can be turned on a dime today. But here’s the two things we can do. We can convince their children. You would be amazed how many children have a different viewpoint than their parents, and how they can pull their parents off the ledge. I did that with my parents when I got elected. My dad would call, and he’s watching Fox News all the time. And I finally said, “Dad, I’m in the middle of this and I don’t have near the stress you do, and you can’t even see the difference. Right?” And he’s like, “You know what? You’re right.”

The other thing is, if only every one of those people running against Donald Trump in the primary would tell the dang truth, people would actually believe it. Donald Trump gets indicted with all these different indictments and then they ask, you know, ‘What do you think, Tim Scott?” “What do you think, Nikki Haley?” “What do you think, Vivek Ramaswamy? What are your feelings on these indictments?” But every one of those people say this is a witch hunt.

Goldberg: I appreciate the view. I’m not sure I believe you, though. The truest thing that Donald Trump ever said was that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and his followers would still support him. It seems like he understood something elemental there.

Kinzinger: I guess I would caveat that. I don’t necessarily believe, if Nikki Haley alone came out and said it, that it would be game over for Donald Trump. I think this is a specific moment where if all these people told the base the truth, they could damage his support significantly.

Goldberg: Stay on this question of Trump and Trumpism. Who do you blame for his return?

Kinzinger: One person: Kevin McCarthy. And I’m going to tell you exactly why. So there was a period after January 6 for two or three weeks. It was quiet. And we’d meet in a room with all the Republican men and women of Congress. Kevin would stand up, all that stuff—if you’re in the room, you could sense there was this trepidation in the room about, like, “We don’t know what’s next. We don’t know where we’re going. What are we supposed to do?” Until the day Kevin McCarthy showed up with a picture of Donald Trump. And just like that, everything changed.

[David Frum: Kevin McCarthy, have you no sense of decency?]

Goldberg: You’re talking about his visit to Mar-a-Lago.

Kinzinger: His visit to Mar-a-Lago. Those of us that voted for impeachment were leading the charge against Donald Trump. People were actually coming up to us and asking us, “How do I do this?” We were talking about “How do we get the downtown PAC community to only support those that are pro-democracy?” We were going to set up our own scoring and vetting system to say This person voted against certification; this person voted for it, and only give money to the people that voted for it. And you think about the power that could have had.

Then that picture happened in Mar-a-Lago, and all of a sudden we went from considering doing a vote of no confidence against Kevin McCarthy because of his role in January 6 to a point where everybody turned against me, Liz Cheney, and the others that voted to impeach, all because of that picture.

Goldberg: So you must be at least a little bit happy about Kevin McCarthy’s downfall.

Kinzinger: I’m very happy about it. I’m very happy. I’ve got to be honest. I’m sorry. It’s not great for the country, but it’s really good.

Goldberg: You’re describing Kevin McCarthy as a person who went along with the radical pro-Trump, anti-democracy right and then he eventually got eaten by them.

Kinzinger: This dynamic to an extent has always existed. It would be people like me fighting against the Jim Jordans, but it was behind the scenes. Now it’s brought out to the open because for the first time you now see the people like me—I will call them the moderates, even though there’s really no moderates left. The moderates are finally standing up and fighting back with some of the tactics that Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan used.

Why is it that terrorists are so powerful? Because they’re willing to do something that most other people aren’t: you know, commit an act of terror if you’re a legislative terrorist, like John Boehner called Jim Jordan very accurately, and he’s willing to vacate the chair or Matt Gaetz is willing to vacate the chair. They’re powerful unless people push back. And that’s what’s happening. How does a Kevin McCarthy get to this point? A man who I thought had a red line, I always thought he was a very good politician and that he could play around the edges, but he wouldn’t cross [the line]. And in January, he cut a deal that made what happened a few weeks ago completely obvious. Everybody knew this would happen. That’s how we’ve gotten to where we are. And this is a moment where the Republican Party either will collapse in a heap of fire or they will actually fix themselves somehow through this.

The country needs a healthy Republican Party regardless of what you feel about the Republican Party, because we need a liberal and a conservative philosophy competing in the United States. That’s what a healthy democracy is.

Goldberg: Does Trumpism survive Trump?

Kinzinger: Five months ago, if we were sitting here and you said, “Does it survive past Trump?” I’d be like, absolutely. Because Trumpism has now been learned by others. But I’m starting to play with the idea that maybe enough Republicans are starting to get exhausted of Trump and maybe Trumpism doesn’t survive. Donald Trump got elected in front of a wave of people that wanted to break the system. But there is an undercurrent right now of people that are desperate to fix and heal the system. And when that right person comes along, like an Obama-type character, I think that may revolutionize the future, but I’m not sure.

Goldberg: Can you imagine yourself back in Congress as a Republican?

Kinzinger: That’s two different questions. Could I imagine myself back in the House? No. Could I imagine myself back in politics? Yes. Could I imagine myself back in politics as a Republican? Not in the current environment.

Goldberg: In other words, do you think that the fever would break to a point where the Republican Party would be a different party and have you back?

Kinzinger: I think someday; I just don’t know when that’s going to be. And it’s not now. I think if I ran as a Republican now, I wouldn’t do too well.

Goldberg: Are you still a Republican?

Adam Kinzinger: It’s an interesting question. I will not vote Republican. I voted Democratic last election. I intend to vote Democratic this election, not because I’ve changed my mind necessarily—I’ve moderated, you know, quite a bit—but because I think it is a binary choice. Do you like democracy or don’t you like democracy? And I think that the only thing we can vote on in 2024 is democracy. So I’m not giving up the title Republican yet, because I haven’t changed. They have. And I refuse to give them that satisfaction yet. But I feel like a man without a party.

Goldberg: Why do your colleagues want to stay in Congress so badly?

Kinzinger: I don’t know.

Goldberg: It doesn’t look like the greatest job.

Kinzinger: It’s not the greatest job. But, okay, when you walk into a room for five or 10 years and no matter what room you walk in, unless it’s the White House, you are the center of attention because you’re the highest-ranking person there and you’ve spent your whole life to attain this job—a lot of my colleagues spent everything to become that. Losing that freaks you out. As somebody that announced I wasn’t running again, the thing you fear the most is how do I feel the second after I put out that press release?

My co-pilot in Iraq sent me a text that said, “I’m ashamed to have ever served with you.” I had family that sent me a certified letter saying they’re ashamed to share my last name, that I was working for the devil. I used to laugh about it 10 months ago, but I’ve really allowed myself to accept what damage that’s done to me and my family. It’s not easy to go through. But I’m going to tell you, I have 0.0 percent regret for what I did, and I would do it all the exact same again.

In an interview last week on Fox News, the newly elected speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, told host Sean Hannity, “Someone asked me today in the media, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”

For many politicians, that would be a throwaway line. But not for Mike Johnson. When he told a Baptist newspaper in 2016, “My faith informs everything I do,” he meant it. His faith is his lodestar.

But faith, including the Christian faith, manifests itself in many different ways, with a wide range of presuppositions and perspectives. There is no single worldview among Christians—nor in the Bible itself, which is multivocal, written over thousands of years by dozens of different writers. Christians today disagree profoundly on countless doctrinal issues. And does any serious student of Scripture not see differences between the worldview of the Pentateuch and the prophets, between the slaughter of the Canaanites and the Sermon on the Mount?

So what do we know about the faith and the worldview of Mike Johnson?

Johnson, 51, has deep ties to the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination. He believes in a literal reading of the Bible, including the Book of Genesis. Johnson is a close friend of Ken Ham, the CEO and founder of Answers in Genesis, and provided legal services to that ministry in 2015.

[Joshua Benton: Where is Mike Johnson’s ironclad oath?]

Answers in Genesis rejects evolution and believes that the universe is 6,000 years old; to believe anything else would be to undermine the authority of the Bible. “We’re not just about creation/evolution, the age of the Earth or fossils,” Ham told Johnson and his wife, Kelly, on their podcast. “We’re really on about the authority of the Word of God and the Gospel of Jesus Christ and helping equip people to have a true Christian worldview.” Johnson is enthusiastically on board; he has suggested that school shootings are the result of having taught generations of Americans “that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and you evolve from the primordial slime.”

Johnson wants churches to be more politicized; he favors overturning the 1954 Johnson Amendment, which prevents churches from engaging in any political campaign activity if they want to keep their tax-exempt status. He also believes that churches are unceasingly under assault, and that Christian viewpoints “are censored and silenced.”

In the 2000s, Johnson was an attorney and spokesman for the Alliance Defense Fund, known today as Alliance Defending Freedom. It describes itself as “one of the leading Christian law firms committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, marriage and family, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.” Johnson has written in favor of criminalizing gay sex. He has called abortion a “holocaust.” And he argued that “prevailing judicial philosophy” in the 2005 right-to-die case involving Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman, was “no different than Hitler’s.”

“Some people are called to pastoral ministry and others to music ministry,” he’s said. “I was called to legal ministry, and I’ve been out on the front lines of the ‘culture war.’”

He has surely been that.

But in order to better understand Johnson’s worldview, it’s important to recognize the influence of David Barton on the new House speaker.

In 2021, Johnson spoke at a gathering where he praised Barton. Barton, while not well known outside of certain evangelical and fundamentalist circles, is significant within them. A graduate of Oral Roberts University with a degree in Christian education, Barton is the former vice chair of the Texas Republican Party and has advised figures including Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, and former Representative Michele Bachmann. He considers Donald Trump one of the five greatest presidents in American history.

Johnson said he was introduced to Barton’s work a quarter of a century ago; it “has had such a profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” By all accounts that is true. If you listen to Johnson speak on the “so-called separation of Church and state” and claim that “the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” you will hear echoes of Barton.  

Although not a historian, Barton has for years been engaged in what he calls “historical reclamation,” by which he means showing that the Founders, including Thomas Jefferson, were Christian men determined to create a Christian nation. In 1988 he founded Wallbuilders, an organization that promotes the idea that the separation of Church and state is a myth.

“It’s really hard to overstate the influence that Barton has had in conservative evangelical spaces,” the Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, told Politico. “For them, he has really defined America as a Christian nation.”

“What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray,” she continued. “It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.”

“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” John Fea, the chair of the history department at the evangelical Messiah University, told NBC News. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”

In 2012, Barton wrote The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Among other things, he argued that Jefferson was a “conventional Christian” despite the fact that Jefferson questioned many of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of religion, said it would have been better titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a piece of historical scholarship, the book is awful,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The book was so riddled with historical inaccuracies that it was recalled by its Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, because “basic truths just were not there.”

But Barton’s distorted views are hardly confined to history. He has said he doesn’t think medical authorities will ever find a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. This view is “based on a particular Bible verse,” Romans 1:27. He believes that AIDS is God’s punishment for sin; an AIDS vaccine would keep “your body from penalizing you”—which would be contrary to the teaching of the word of God. QED, though with a certain cruel twist.

Mike Johnson’s ascension to the speakership has made Barton and those within that evangelical subculture giddy; they know Johnson is one of them. This is the first time “in our lifetime” that Congress has appointed “a guy of this character, this commitment, this knowledge, this experience and this devout faith” as House speaker, Barton said on a podcast. He also said that he’s spoken with Johnson’s team, “talking with them about staff.”

“They need to be the people with his worldview,” Barton said. He added that Johnson will “make you smile before he hits you in the mouth so he won’t bloody your lips when he breaks your teeth.”

“I am a rule-of-law guy,” Mike Johnson told Sean Hannity last week. Elsewhere, according to The New York Times, he’s complained to student groups, “There’s no transcendent principles anymore. There’s no eternal judge. There’s no absolute standards of right and wrong. All this is exactly the opposite of the way we were founded as a country.”

At the same time, Johnson has been a pivotal figure in undermining the rule of law—specifically trying to overturn the 2020 presidential-election results. In a carefully reported story on the 139 House Republicans who voted to dispute the Electoral College count, three New York Times reporters wrote, “In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.”

Johnson also collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a groundless Texas lawsuit to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joe Biden.

According to a report in the Times, Johnson “sent an email to his Republican colleagues soliciting signatures for the legal brief in support of it. The initiative had been personally blessed by Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson wrote, and the president was ‘anxiously awaiting’ to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.”

Johnson also claimed in a radio interview that a software system used for voting was “suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.” According to Johnson, “The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion. Look, there’s a lot of merit to that.”

“The fix was in,” according to Johnson.

Actually, it was not. A statement by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process, declared that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.” Not been a single finding has refuted that claim, but many have confirmed it.  

A report by a group of lifelong Republicans took a careful look at the charges by Trump and his supporters. It showed the election was lost by Trump, not stolen from him. In coming to that conclusion, it examined every count of every case brought in six battleground states.

“Even now, twenty months after the election”—the report came out in July 2022—“a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time.”

We now know, too, that time and time again Trump’s own staff refuted his various allegations of voter fraud.

[David A. Graham: The House Republicans’ troubling new litmus test]

So in Speaker Johnson we have a man whose Christian worldview has led him into a hall of mirrors—historically, scientifically, legally, and constitutionally. A “rule-of-law guy” who laments a lack of “absolute standards of right and wrong” was a key participant in undermining the rule of law and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has done so much to shatter absolute standards of right and wrong.

From what I can tell, Mike Johnson—unlike, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—is not cynical; he seems to be a true believer, and a zealot. A polite and mild-mannered zealot, to be sure, especially by MAGA standards, but a zealot nonetheless. And what makes this doubly painful for many of us is that he uses his Christian faith to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on truth. I can’t help thinking this isn’t quite what Jesus had in mind.

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Americans don’t understand foreign aid. Instead of relying on misinformed citizens, we should demand better answers from national leaders who want to cut aid to our friends and allies and imperil American security.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

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Persistent Foreign-Aid Myths

The Washington Post sent a reporter to a diner in Shreveport, Louisiana, last week to talk with voters in the district represented by the new speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. And wouldn’t you know it, they were very happy to see him become speaker, including one voter in the diner who—imagine the luck—just happened to be Mike Johnson’s mother. “God did this,” Jeanne Johnson said of her son’s ascension to the speakership.

I have my doubts about God’s participation in American elections, but she’s a proud mom, and understandably so. She told the reporter that Johnson “began leading as a child,” stepping up at a young age to help the family. That’s nice; my mom, God rest her soul, used to say nice things about me too.

The rest of the article included predictable discussions with the local burghers who hope we can finally overcome all this nastiness in our politics—there is no apparent awareness of how all that unpleasantness got started—and get to work and solve problems under the leadership of an obviously swell guy. (In fact, we are told he even calmed an angry voter at a town hall. Amazing.) Johnson, of course, also voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and has many views that would have been considered retrograde by most Americans even 30 years ago, but gosh darn it, people in Shreveport sure seem to like him.

I remain astonished that so much of the media remain committed to covering Donald Trump and sedition-adjacent extremists such as Johnson as if they are normal American politicians. But while Americans pretend that all is well, the rest of the world is busily going about its terrifying business, which is why one comment in the Post article jumped out at me.

“Politics here is personal,” according to Celeste Gauthier, 45. (The Post, for some reason, notes that Gauthier attended Middlebury College for a time—perhaps as a clumsy way of trying to tell us she’s not merely some rough local, and that she returned from Vermont to help run her family’s three restaurants.) She is concerned:

“People really do look at the funding we’re sending to Israel and Ukraine and say, ‘I can’t afford to go to Kroger,’” Gauthier said as she sat amid the lunchtime crowd, some of whom she said had stopped buying beverages because of the cost. “A lot of these customers know Mike Johnson and think we often get overlooked and maybe we won’t anymore,” she said.

I’m not sure what it means to be “overlooked” in a cherry-red district in a state where, as the Post notes, Republicans will control all three branches of state government once the conservative governor-elect is sworn in, but the comment about foreign aid is a classic expression of how little people understand about the subject.

Perhaps Gauthier or others believe that the new speaker—who has been opposed to sending aid to Ukraine—would redirect the money back to “overlooked” Louisianans, maybe as increased aid to the poor. He wouldn’t, of course, as he has already proposed huge cuts in social spending. As for Israel, evangelical Christians such as Johnson have a special interest in Israel for their own eschatological reasons, and Johnson has already decided to decouple aid to Israel from aid to Ukraine. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—whose understanding of foreign policy is practically Churchillian compared with Johnson’s—is none too happy about that.

Let’s review some important realities.

First, foreign aid is about 1 percent of the U.S. budget, roughly $60 billion. Special appropriations to Ukraine have, over the course of 18 months, added up to about $75 billion, including both humanitarian aid and weapons. Israel—a far smaller country that has, over the past 70 years, cumulatively received more foreign aid from the United States than from any other country—usually gets about $3 billion, but Joe Biden now wants to add about $14 billion to that.

That’s a lot of money. To put it in perspective, however, Americans forked over about $181 billion annually on snacks, and $115 billion for beer last year. (They also shell out about $7 billion annually just for potato chips. The snack spending is increasing, perhaps because Americans now spend about $30 billion on legal marijuana every year.) Americans also ante up a few bucks here and there on legal sports gambling, and by “a few” I mean more than $220 billion over the past five years.

I know suds and weed and sports books and pretzels are more fun than helping Ukrainians stay alive. And I know, too, that supposedly small-government conservatives will answer: It’s none of your damn business what Americans are spending their money on.

They’re right—up to a point. But we are, in theory, adults who can establish sensible priorities. We pay taxes so that the federal government can do things that no other level of government can achieve, and national security is one of them. Right now, the Russian army—the greatest threat to NATO in Europe—is taking immense losses on a foreign battlefield for a total investment that (as of this moment) is less than one-tenth of the amount we spend on defense in a single year. This is the spending Mike Johnson is so worried about?

Of course, we might repeat one more time that much of the food and weapons and other goods America sends to places like Israel and Ukraine are actually made by Americans. And yet many Republican leaders (and their propaganda arm at Fox and other outlets) continue to talk about aid as if some State Department phantom in a trench coat meets the president of Ukraine or the prime minister of Israel in an alley and hands over a metal briefcase filled with neatly wrapped stacks of bills.

We need to stop asking people in diners about foreign aid. (Populists who demand that we rely on guidance from The People should remember that most Americans think foreign aid should be about 10 percent of the budget—a percentage those voters think would be a reduction but would actually be a massive increase.) Instead, put our national leaders on the spot to explain what they think foreign aid is, where it goes, and what it does, and then call them out, every time, when they spin fantasies about it. Otherwise, legislators such as Johnson will be able to sit back and let the folks at the pie counter believe that he’s going to round up $75 billion and send it back home.

That’s an old and dumb trope, but it works. If you’re a Republican in Congress, and if you can stay in Washington by convincing people at the diner that you’re going to take cash from Ukrainians (wherever they are) and give it back to the hardworking waitress pouring your coffee, then you do it—because in this new GOP, your continued presence in Washington is more important than anything, including the security of the United States.

Related:

Yes, the U.S. can afford to help its allies. Why the GOP extremists oppose Ukraine

Today’s News

Israel began its ground offensive in Gaza over the weekend. Tanks and troops continue to push deeper into the city. A trial began in Colorado over whether Donald Trump is ineligible to hold presidential office again under the Fourteenth Amendment. Russian protesters in the largely Muslim-populated area of Dagestan marched on an airport, surrounding a plane that had arrived from Tel Aviv, on Sunday; at least 10 people were injured.

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P.S.

Back in February, I wrote that I was somewhat mystified when Nikki Haley entered the GOP primaries. I was never a fan of the South Carolina governor, because I reject any candidate who bent the knee to Donald Trump. I described her announcement of her candidacy as “vapid and weightless,” and I expected her campaign to be no better. I assumed that she would be gone early.

Was I wrong? Haley was strong in the GOP debates (such that they were without Trump) and is now surging ahead of the hapless Ron DeSantis as the most credible Trump alternative. My friend Michael Strain today even presented “The Case for Nikki Haley” in National Review, a magazine that up until now has been a DeSantis stronghold. I remain convinced that Haley cannot beat Trump, even if she would be more formidable against Biden than either Trump or DeSantis. But I was too quick off the blocks in my assumption that Haley was going to get bigfooted off the stage by other candidates. Of course, I also didn’t predict that Vivek Ramaswamy would be on that same stage and that he would claim the early prize for “most obnoxious GOPer not named Trump.” I’m a creative guy, but there are limits even to my imagination.

— Tom

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