Struggling Mike Johnson Barely Unites His Own Party in Speaker Vote

House Speaker Mike Johnson nearly lost the first floor vote Friday to retain the gavel.

When the vote was unofficially called, a handful of aimless Republican votes for other candidates (who weren’t running for the House’s most prized position) appeared to make it mathematically impossible for Johnson to win.

Johnson had faced near-impossible margins from the jump: With a full House floor and a unified Democratic caucus, the speaker could only afford to lose one Republican on his path to 218 votes. Johnson ended the round just shy of the goal, with 216 votes in the pocket.

But three votes against his bid by Representatives Thomas Massie, Ralph Norman, and Keith Self threw that into shambles. Massie voted for Representative Tom Emmer, Norman voted for Representative Jim Jordan (who quietly weighed running last week before dropping the bid), and Self voted for Representative Byron Donalds. Norman and Self ultimately changed their vote to Johnson, clinching the necessary 218.

Representative Chip Roy—a speculated holdout—also changed his vote at the last minute in favor of Johnson.

This story has been updated.

Those who worked tirelessly for President-elect Trump during campaign season may not get the coveted administration jobs they were promised, according to reporting from NOTUS. The lower-level roles that Trump has yet to fill were apparently supposed to go to the bureaucrats of Project 2025. But Trump’s strategic separation from the project put the future jobs of many of those bureaucrats in jeopardy.

Trump has apparently been unclear about what those jobs will even be, and incredibly slow at announcing them. “There’s growing frustration among the would-be’s,” an anonymous Republican told NOTUS. “There’s only three weeks left til inauguration and some people are trying to figure out what their future is going to look like with no clarity.”

The best way to actually get a job in the Trump administration is apparently to be in the right place at the right time. “You basically just blast around [a name] until you get a response, and then you make sure they apply on the inside, and then you follow up weeks later, and you keep on pushing,” a Trump loyalist told NOTUS. “I haven’t heard of a better way to guarantee anything.”

Donald Trump’s incoming “border czar,” Tom Homan, claimed that there was likely a “terrorist connection” between Wednesday’s Cybertruck explosion in Las Vegas and the deadly truck attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve—but then admitted he’s just going off a feeling.

Fox News’s Sandra Smith pressed Homan for information during an interview Thursday where he repeatedly referred to a “connection” between the two incidents. Smith told Homan that law enforcement had presented no evidence tying them together.

“You said you believed as this investigation carries out in Las Vegas … they will find a connection. Do you have any other information? Or have you been privy to any other information, other than what we just directly heard from the police there in Las Vegas?” Smith asked.

“No, I don’t. This is a gut feeling,” Homan explained. “I’ve done this for three and a half decades, I just think there’s too many similarities, too much—too much coincidence.

“I think something down the road, they’re gonna show, there’s some sort of connection. Whether some same network, or where they got the tools to pull these terrorist attacks off. I just feel like there’s gonna be something down the road. And I could be wrong, just a gut feeling I have,” Homan said.

So Homan’s got nothing, and his appearance was simply an opportunity to politicize the deaths of 14 people in New Orleans; to fearmonger ahead of Trump’s administration and its plan to enact draconian mass deportations.

Homan warned that “the threats aren’t over,” quickly switching the subject to the southern border, even though neither event seems to have been related to immigration at all. Homan continued to insist that the Cybertruck explosion was a “terrorist attack,” despite Las Vegas authorities suggesting it was a suicide.

Homan also ranted about the “insider threat” from members of the military and federal service, because both Matthew Livelsberger, the Cybertruck driver, and Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabba, the driver in New Orleans, served in the U.S. military.

Democratic Representative Troy Carter is torching Republicans for leveraging the horrific New Year’s Eve attack in New Orleans as short-lived political fodder.

Speaking with CNN on Thursday, the Louisiana Democrat flamed conservative leadership, accusing the party of using the deaths of 15 people to push misinformation that directly benefits their agenda.

“This is an American attack. This is an attack on our democracy. This is an attack on our freedoms. This person was radicalized, but it was an American citizen, a citizen of Texas, and someone who was honorably discharged from the United States Army,” Carter told anchor Brianna Keilar. “And we should not play games with the American people to try and imply that it was something that it wasn’t, which somehow suggests that this was a Democrat or Republican issue. And we have to be more mature and more direct and fair and honest with the American people.”

“This is not the time to play political brinkmanship or gamesmanship,” he continued.

Carter was, in part, responding to a lengthy rant that Donald Trump posted to Truth Social on Thursday, in which he repeatedly claimed that the domestic terrorism incident was the result of open borders and the Democratic establishment. In the same breath, the president-elect attacked the FBI and the Department of Justice, baselessly accusing the agencies of being distracted by his own wrongdoing to prevent terrorist attacks.

But Trump’s nativist messaging is in direct conflict with the facts of the case: The FBI’s suspect for the attack, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is a U.S. citizen born in Texas. And choosing to undermine the reputation of investigative agencies looking into the attack is a hair-raising choice for the man about to retake the White House in 18 days.

“This is a time that we should be united as Americans to push back against terrorism, push back against terrorist threats, and to demonstrate to the American people that we will use every resource that we have to combat these kind of hateful and heinous acts,” Carter said. “The families of the loved ones who have died and those who are in the hospital fighting for their lives, and our law enforcement agents from the federal, local, and state deserve better.”

The MAGAsphere is starting to rally around the Las Vegas attacker after discovering that he was one of them. Matthew Livelberger, the 37-year old Green Beret who shot himself in a Cybertruck before blowing it up in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, “loved Trump” and “was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” his uncle told The Independent.

This has led to admiration from some of the MAGA faithful, even though the attack injured seven innocent people. “The Vegas dude seems like a real CHAD??” former Republican congressman and failed attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz posted on X, using internet slang that denotes (to some) a hypermasculine, fit, and often sexually successful individual.

Others quickly moved to dismiss any of the questions that a Trump supporter shooting himself and blowing up his car might otherwise raise: “Just seems like a test run of distractions to try and keep Trump from office,” one online MAGA supporter commented. “Seems like he was a loose end that needed to be tidied up. Someone should look into his travel history around the time of January 6, 2021, wrote another. “Also, if he had sniper training, could have been one of the CIA/DHS/DOD goons deployed against El Jefe in Butler, PA on 7/13.”

Livelsberger’s motive is still unknown, and may remain so. But that won’t stop MAGA from making him into their martyr.