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After a chaotic week in which House Speaker Mike Johnson found himself at odds, at different times, with President-elect Donald Trump, hardline conservatives and minority Democrats, he returned to a similar joke.
Anyone else who could get the 218 votes it takes to win the speaker’s gavel was welcome to have it.
Johnson told reporters Friday evening he’d spoken to Elon Musk, the billionaire ally of Trump who played a key role earlier in the week in tanking the bipartisan deal Johnson had spent weeks negotiating, “about the extraordinary challenges of the job.”
“And I said, ‘Hey, you want to be speaker of the House? I don’t know,’” Johnson said. “He said, ‘This may be the hardest job in the world.’”
It wasn’t the only time the Louisiana Republican made that joke this week.
“He does crack that joke quite a bit,” said California Rep. David Valadao, a key House Republican negotiator who was involved in hashing out the spending plan that Congress approved early Saturday, avoiding a shutdown that would cause disruptions across the country.
“In reality, I think we all know that getting to 218 in this conference today is not an easy task for anyone,” Valadao said. “These past two years have been a little bit of a roller coaster, and we expect that to continue.”
Republicans are weeks away from having full control of the federal government, but this week previewed how, even with Trump enjoying GOP majorities in the House and Senate and a conservative Supreme Court next year, governing won’t be easy. And in particular, it laid bare the challenge Johnson will face with an even slimmer GOP House majority, disparate factions warring with each other and Trump lobbing last-minute requests like his demand — to the chagrin of House Freedom Caucus conservatives — to take the debt ceiling off the table early in his presidency.
As the week ended, many lawmakers left for the holidays fuming at Johnson for leaving them in the dark for much of the process of hashing out a government funding measure, and his rapid changes in approach.
“I’d love to have more transparency,” Georgia Rep. Mike Collins said.
However, Collins noted that Johnson — who won the gavel after conservatives’ ouster of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy kicked off weeks of chaos in 2023 — retains Trump’s support.
“President Trump says he’s supporting him, and I’m supporting him,” Collins said.
Trump — with a hefty assist from Musk’s social media frenzy — on Wednesday killed the plan Johnson had spent weeks developing: a short-term spending bill that could only be passed with Democratic support. The president-elect also injected a new issue into the government funding debate, demanding that the debt ceiling, currently suspended but set to be reinstated at the start of next year, be extended to keep that issue from dominating the early stages of his second term in the White House.
The speaker’s next option — a measure that would have heeded Trump’s demand by extending the debt ceiling into 2027 — faltered when 38 members of his own party, along with most Democrats, opposed it, underscoring the disproportionate power of hardline Republicans in such a narrow majority.
Finally, on Friday — with six hours to spare before the government funding deadline — Johnson and the House GOP punted. The House approved a three-month spending bill that included $110 billion for disaster relief and a one-year extension of the farm bill.
It did not contain the debt ceiling extension that Trump demanded.
And all of the votes against the bill were Republicans — 34 of them.
Still, after the vote, Johnson claimed victory — and insisted he and Trump were on the same page. The speaker said he’d spoken with both Trump and Musk on Friday night.
“Throughout this process, spoke with him, most recently about 45 minutes ago. He knew exactly what we were doing and why, and this is a good outcome for the country. I think he certainly is happy about this outcome as well,” Johnson said of the president-elect.
Musk, on X, the social media platform he owns, praised Johnson for trimming concessions to Democrats from the measure, saying it “went from a bill that weighed pounds to a bill that weighed ounces.”
“The Speaker did a good job here, given the circumstances,” Musk wrote.
Democrats, meanwhile, took a victory lap. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the party’s votes brought the bill across the finish line with many Republicans breaking ranks.
“House Democrats have successfully stopped extreme, MAGA Republicans from shutting down the government, crashing the economy and hurting working class Americans all across the land,” the New York Democrat said.
The next fight for Johnson will be retaining the speakership when the new Congress is sworn in on January 3.
Some House Republicans who opposed the year-end funding bill on Friday were noncommittal on whether they’d support him.
Rep. Keith Self of Texas — who called simple funding bills “the only way to govern” — said he had “no comment” on whether he’ll back Johnson next year.
Asked if he thinks Johnson’s chances of being reelected speaker have been damaged, Texas Rep. Chip Roy said he’s “not gonna go down that road,” adding, “We’ve got through tonight.”
As House Republicans left town, multiple lawmakers told CNN they believed the Louisiana Republican’s future was not in immediate jeopardy for a key reason: No other lawmaker is seeking the job.
Privately, some Republicans acknowledge they have spoken among themselves about potential options. Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, Minnesota Rep. Tom Emmer and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan have all made bids before and might do so again. But there has been no active jockeying in the last several days, according to multiple GOP leadership sources.
Any other candidate would need to first secure the votes, and then find their way out of a difficult January working with the Trump administration on spending, the debt limit, expiring tax cuts, a massive border package and more.
One GOP lawmaker joked to CNN that if they were suddenly nominated and asked to serve, they would sooner resign.
And unlike the resistance against McCarthy, Johnson’s sole detractor so far is not pushing others to join him.
Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said he didn’t know of any other GOP lawmakers who would be siding with him.
“Not whipping it. Don’t know,” Massie said when asked if other Republicans would join him in opposing Johnson.
The political reality that Republicans don’t have an alternative, and Johnson seems to retain Trump’s support, didn’t stop many lawmakers from fuming at the speaker over how close the House came to triggering a government shutdown.
Massie called Johnson’s handling of the situation “not that great,” saying the speaker had a lack of “situational awareness” to know the first bill “was a dog and it wouldn’t go anywhere.”
“Then immediately, last night, immediately, with like, 12 hours notice, just throwing a debt limit increase into a bill because the president wanted it,” Massie said, referring to Trump. “In some sense, there’s an institutional victory here, which is the president said jump, and we didn’t jump.”
Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw expressed frustration with Trump’s last-minute decision to impose his demands on House Republicans after they had already cleared a path to keep the government open into the early days of the new administration.
“I will eat sh*t sandwiches, which is budget bills and debt ceiling increases, so that Trump has a great runway, but you’ve got to plan ahead to do that,” he said.
Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, who has repeatedly expressed dismay with how massive spending bills are handled, called the situation “the sewer,” adding, “It’s just what it is. It’s never any different.”
CNN’s Manu Raju and Ali Main contributed to this report.
