John Boehner Amid GOP Doom Tour: I Voted For Trump in 2020
John Boehner has never been shy to level a well-crafted piece of invective at Donald Trump, a figure he blames, among others, for encouraging the descent of the Republican Party into insanity.
In On the House: A Washington Memoir, Boehner writes that Trump “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.”
But in a new interview with Time magazine, Boehner revealed that he actually voted for the Republican incumbent in the 2020 election.
“I voted for Donald Trump,” he said. “I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in. I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a President does.”
In On the House: A Washington Memoir, the former House Speaker traces the roots of the derailment of his own party back to 2010, when he presided over Congress after President Barack Obama took a beating in the midterm elections, ushering in a wave of disruptive freshman Republicans who “wanted to blow up Washington.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, described as “Lucifer in the flesh,” is the target of particular ire. As is Rep. Jim Jordan, who Boehner calls a political terrorist.
Following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, in which a horde of Trump supporters beat police, ransacked the Capitol, and hunted lawmakers in a bid to thwart the electoral process, Boehner blamed the president’s “lies.”
“I once said the party of Lincoln and Reagan is off taking a nap,” he wrote in a tweet. “The nap has become a nightmare for our nation. The GOP must awaken. The invasion of our Capitol by a mob, incited by lies from some entrusted with power, is a disgrace to all who sacrificed to build our Republic.”
In an interview with USA Today from this week, Boehner said Trump’s comments from the summer of 2020 (before the election) fueled the violence that day.
“I don’t think it was just about him showing up at a rally on Jan. 6,” he said. “The comments that were made all summer about the election was going to be stolen from him, all the follow-up noise that occurred after the election – I kept looking for the facts.”
“What struck me, especially after the election, was, here’s all these people loyal to Donald Trump, and he abused them,” Boehner said. “He stepped all over their loyalty to him by continuing to say things that just weren’t true.”
