Trump’s Dark Little “Secret” With Mike Johnson Is Actually a Threat

Donald Trump says that he and Speaker Mike Johnson have a dirty “little secret.”

Speaking at a rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday, Trump seemed to tell his fans that he and the Republican House speaker have a plan to make sure that Republicans clinch victory in the House and the presidential election.

“I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact,” Trump said, before claiming he’d only reveal the secret after the election.

Though it’s unclear exactly what the plan may be, the implication is not subtle: Johnson is ready to help Trump win the election. As Politico noted, these “sinister comments … could be a reference to the House settling a contested election.”

Some in Congress agree, even sounding alarms about the comments. “I think the secret yesterday that he [Donald Trump] referenced very likely may relate to his compact with Mike Johnson to—as a back-up plan for when he loses—to overturn this election on January 6,” said Representative Daniel Goldman on Monday morning.

Before he was elected speaker, Johnson played a key role in the efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election results, taking the lead in filing a briefing in a lawsuit to stop Joe Biden’s victory.

On Sunday, Johnson also told Axios that he has a “very close working relationship with President Trump and consider[s] him now a close friend.”

“I know that’s mutual,” Johnson continued. “[Trump] tells me how much confidence he has in my leadership.”

“He’s going to be around for a long time, I predict,” said Trump at the rally.

Senator Lindsay Graham’s attack on “dangerous” rhetoric calling Donald Trump a fascist got promptly shut down by video evidence of the former president calling Kamala Harris a fascist. 

Last week, retired Marine General John Kelly, Trump’s former chief of staff, said the former president fell under “the general definition of fascist.” Mark Esper, the former defense secretary, said that he agreed with Kelly’s assessment. Earlier this month, it was reported that retired General Mark Milley called Trump “fascist to the core.”

These statements predictably sent Trump into a rage, and Graham attempted to smear the Republican presidential candidate’s critics Sunday for trying to sound the alarm about their former boss.  

“He’s not a fascist. He’s not Hitler, and that just shows you how desperate this campaign is,” Graham said during an appearance on ABC’s This Week with host Jonathan Karl. 

These generals are “trying to turn joy into fear,” Graham cried, as if he were not defending the candidate who, just this weekend, falsely claimed American cities had been “invaded and conquered” by immigrants. 

Graham became hysterical as he claimed Trump’s critics had “turned America upside-down” by “using rhetoric that is dangerous and off-base” to “try to scare Americans.” The South Carolina Republican also claimed the former White House advisers had “called [Trump] Hitler,” which they didn’t.

“Now you have been very critical of the generals, two of them using the word ‘fascist.’ Mitch McConnell and Speaker Mike Johnson have been very critical, saying ‘This is inciting violence,’ ‘How dare you call Donald Trump a fascist?’ Let me just play you a little bit about what Donald Trump has had to say about Kamala Harris,” Karl said. 

Cut to an edit of Trump calling Harris a fascist over and over again. 

“The true divide in American politics today is between these far-left fascists led by Harris and her group,” Trump said at a rally on August 23.

“We have a fascist person running, who’s incompetent,” Trump said again, just three days later. 

“She’s a Marxist, communist, fascist, socialist—she’s not actually a socialist,” Trump said. 

During a rambling speech in Los Angeles in September, Trump called Harris a “radical left, Marxist, communist, fascist,” though such a person could not, ideologically, exist. 

Graham was quick to make his own attitudes clear, in light of Trump’s rhetoric. “Why don‘t you ask me, ‘Do I think Kamala Harris is a fascist?’ No. Do I think she’s a communist? No. I think she’s the most liberal person to ever be dominated by a major party. I think she’s ineffective, I think she’s incompetent,” Graham said.

Rather than address how brutally ridiculous he just made himself look, the South Carolina Republican started rattling off a stump speech against Harris.

Karl pushed Graham to acknowledge Trump’s “stronger” language. 

“You’re not having Senator Lindsey Graham say she’s a fascist, she’s just incompetent,” Graham sputtered, as Karl brought their interview to a close. 

Last week, more than a dozen officials agreed with Kelly’s assessment that Trump is a fascist, stating that “this is who Donald Trump is” in a letter published Friday. 

Choosing Madison Square Garden as the New York City venue to showcase Donald Trump’s vengeful and divisive rhetoric had already evoked connections to the pro-Nazi rally held in the same location in 1939. But who Trump chose to platform at the event Sunday, and what they said, suggested that the comparisons weren’t far off.

Speaking before thousands at “The World’s Most Famous Arena,” Trump’s guests leaned into the white nationalist “great replacement theory,” donned Nazi-adjacent iconography, and aggressively defined the idea of who is—and who is not—an American.

“The cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only,” said Stephen Miller, a former senior adviser to Trump known for his vicious anti-immigrant policies. “One man, and that man, ladies and gentlemen, that man took a bullet for you, he took a bullet for democracy.”

Tech billionaire Elon Musk also attended the Manhattan event, wearing a full black getup that he described as “dark, gothic MAGA.” But critics noticed something strange on the front of Musk’s hat. Instead of using the normal font seen on Trump’s red “Make America Great Again” caps, Musk opted for something decidedly more Germanic: the Fraktur font, popularized during the early years of the Nazi regime.

Another guest at the blue-state campaign stop was podcast host Tony Hinchcliffe, who launched the lineup with a crass joke about Latinos, claiming that the ethnic group loves “making babies” before mocking Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage.”

Ex–Fox host Tucker Carlson also made an appearance, choosing in part to make fun of Vice President Kamala Harris’s mixed-race heritage.

“It’s gonna be pretty hard [for Democrats] to look at us and say, ‘You know what? Kamala Harris, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive,’” he mocked. “As the first Samoan-Malaysian low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.’”

But not all of the fascist appeals stemmed from Trump’s allies. After allowing Republicans to flounder for weeks while attempting to justify or brush aside his controversial “enemy from within” remarks, Trump himself suddenly decided to double down on authoritarian language.

“They’re smart and they’re vicious, and we have to defeat them,” he said. “And when I say ‘the enemy from within,’ the other side goes crazy. Becomes a sound—‘Oh, how can he say’—no, they’ve done very bad things to this country. They are indeed the enemy from within.”

Forget firing, Donald Trump just pitched having special counsel Jack Smith deported.

During a rambling radio interview on 77WABC’s Cats & Cosby Thursday, Trump threw out Smith’s name when asked about his plans for immigration. 

“Domestically, what could America look like if it continues to have this open border policy that we have seen?” asked host Rita Cosby.

“We can’t have it, it’s, it’s not sustainable, it has to be shut immediately and you have to let people in, but they have to come in legally and you have to get the killers, the murderers, and the mentally deranged, you have to get them out. And we should throw Jack Smith out with them,” Trump said. 

“The mentally deranged people, Jack Smith should be considered mentally deranged and he should be thrown out of the country,” Trump continued. 

Trump seemed to pluck Smith’s name out of thin air, as the special counsel had not yet come up in the interview. Smith has overseen two investigations into Trump, one regarding his alleged efforts to overturn the election results in 2020, and another into his alleged mishandling of classified documents.  

This isn’t the first time Trump has threatened to deport those in the country legally. The former president has repeatedly made threats to deport immigrants who have entered the country under temporary protected status and humanitarian parole.

Shortly before claiming that he would deport one of his political enemies, who is attempting to hold him accountable for his alleged crimes, Trump tried desperately to defend himself from claims that he was a fascist. 

The former president went on a tirade against his former chief of staff, retired U.S. general John Kelly, who said that Trump fell into the “general definition of fascist.” Trump claimed Kelly was simply angry he’d been fired.

Trump went on a wild rant calling Kelly a “stupid person,” “a bully who made up stories,” and “a man of rather low intelligence, who was a tough guy who became a marshmallow.” He swerved into complaints about former Secretaries of Defense Mark Esper and James Mattis, and former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. 

This is Trump’s second threat against Smith in as many days. Trump vowed Thursday to “fire” Smith on his first day in office, in hopes of washing his hands of the two federal cases against him.

Donald Trump and his allies have suggested for months that the 2024 election will be “stolen,” much like they did in the 2020 cycle, prepping unfounded claims ahead of time that the election will be undermined by “noncitizen” voters, overseas ballot programs, and mail-in voting.

But on Friday, Trump officially called it, writing a “cease and desist” on Truth Social that effectively announced the Republican presidential nominee already believes that the November election is rigged—mere days into early voting.

“CEASE & DESIST: I, together with many Attorneys and Legal Scholars, am watching the Sanctity of the 2024 Presidential Election very closely because I know, better than most, the rampant Cheating and Skullduggery that has taken place by the Democrats in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump posted. “It was a Disgrace to our Nation!”

Trump fleetingly acknowledged in September that he did, factually, lose the 2020 election. But his insistence on Friday that he would definitely win the 2024 race came with a threat: that anyone working for the other side of the aisle—from attorneys to election officials and donors—will face consequences when he does.

“Therefore, the 2024 Election, where Votes have just started being cast, will be under the closest professional scrutiny and, WHEN I WIN, those people that CHEATED will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the Law, which will include long term prison sentences so that this Depravity of Justice does not happen again,” Trump wrote. “We cannot let our Country further devolve into a Third World Nation, AND WE WON’T! Please beware that this legal exposure extends to Lawyers, Political Operatives, Donors, Illegal Voters, & Corrupt Election Officials. Those involved in unscrupulous behavior will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our Country.”

Trump’s allies have concretely worked to skew election results in battleground states. In Georgia, a pro-Trump state election board issued prohibitive regulations that would have made it significantly more difficult for the state to find people willing to volunteer for the increasingly arduous job.

Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s board days before the August move, describing Dr. Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”

Those regulations included mandating that poll workers hand-count ballots after they were electronically filed, and granting local election officials the authority to refuse to certify the results. Both of those rules were thrown out by a judge earlier this month.

Meanwhile, some of the most powerful conservatives in the federal legislature, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, have refused to state on the record that they will unequivocally accept the 2024 presidential election results. In an interview with NBC News’s Meet the Press earlier this month, Johnson wavered on whether he would do his job to certify the results regardless of who won, insisting that he would only do so “if the election is free and fair and legal.

“I think Donald J. Trump is your next president, and that can’t happen soon enough,” Johnson said at the time.