Speaker Mike Johnson Admits: “I’m Not Really Speaker”

You the speaker who says he isn't really speaker? According to the New York Times, Speaker Mike Johnson just admitted out loud what a lot of Washington already thinks. On a friendly podcast hosted by Katie Miller, that's Stephen Miller's wife. He said, quote, we have this joke that I'm not really a speaker of the House, talking about how he and his wife talk about it. That's kind of saying the quiet part out loud. That's not a joke. To a lot of people, this joke sounds a lot like reality. Johnson described a job that's completely out of his control, with a Republican conference he can't manage and a schedule he can't tame. Quote, we're in triage every day. He said there's no pattern or schedule. We're kind of in survival mode right now. He complained, I haven't had a vacation day in two years, and claimed literally, this is a, quote, literally 100,000 people have his cell phone number, leaving him missing hundreds of calls and text messages in a day. This is the man second in line to the presidency, presenting himself not as a leader, but as an overwhelmed middle manager in Donald Trump's political organization. What's the real message here, Speaker Johnson? Speaker Mike Johnson went on a friendly podcast this week, admitted to the whole world he's completely overwhelmed, out of his depth. And the jokes about he's not really the speaker. Well, you kind of are, but you also kind of aren't. You basically handed all your power to Dear Leader in the White House, and it's an embarrassment. Let's dig a little bit deeper here. I do think it's troubling at some level for forget a hundred thousand people having your cell phone number, but even 100 people a day texting you, calling you at some level, from a pure information technology standpoint, if you are going to be running the House of Representatives, one of the most important, powerful positions in the entire world, you need to somehow have an organization. I would think at some point you'd have a chief of staff, a couple of deputy chief of staff, and just give them your phone, maybe get a second phone, where literally you've got 10 people, your closest family, the President of the United States, maybe the Senate leader. They're the only people who have your phone number. And you can have a team of people vetting all of these calls and texts coming in, because I got to tell you, Mike Johnson, he seems frazzled. He sounds frazzled, he looks frazzled. And when he jokes, he's not really the Speaker. It's not funny, really. Because it seems to be reality. It is yet another sign our federal government is dysfunctional. And it just seems like he is, is out of control and he doesn't have any sense of, of what he's doing. He describes himself as a firefighter, always answering late night crises. And I understand you don't get to be speaker of the House because you want a typical 9 to 5 job. I'm not suggesting that. But if you're the speaker of the House, you could certainly have a couple of really energetic, bright 28 year olds who need almost no sleep where they could be monitoring calls coming in. There needs to be some choke point that isn't just the one individual cell phone. Now I'm a little older than the speaker, I believe, but I got to tell you, I have difficulty managing things just on a cell phone. I want it to come to my desktop. Sometimes I even print things out. I can't imagine the sheer volume. You got 189 voicemails. How do you even find the time to listen to them? How do you find the time to read them? It's, it just speaks ill of how our government is running now. And you know, Mike Johnson is never, was never anybody's first choice to be speaker of the House. He got this position because there's so many warring factions among the majority of the House that everyone else was sort of, you know, chewed up, spit out and he was kind of last man standing. But he does not enhance his reputation or is his power by saying, he basically jokes that he's not even the Speaker. This is an opportunity for others to say, I'll take the power. If he doesn't have the power, I'll take it myself. What's the real lesson for you and for me? All of us I think, have to come up with some system for simply information management. I don't purport to have a foolproof system. I mean, one thing I try to do though is I look at any message once and figure out where to put it. An email comes in, it's not that I'm on it every two seconds, responding instantly, but certainly by the end of the day I tried to have deleted every email or filed it somewhere. The ones I need to answer, I try to answer same day, deleting most of them, putting as many messages as possible into spam or unsubscribing, not giving out email in the first place. If a mess. If a text comes in, I try to do it on my time so my brain doesn't become frazzled. I mean, this guy, Mike Johnson seems really frazzled. No vacation in two years. You don't think clearly in a situation like that. So I'm a big believer. You've got to have some digital detox time. I try to go for a walk every day, as I did yesterday, as I hope to in just a moment, and leave my cell phone alone at home. Turn it off, leave it at home, go for a walk. Went to the movies last night. I didn't put my phone on vibrate. I literally turned it off. Watched the new Wicked movie with my family. Everyone enjoyed it. You've got to get away from your phone now. I realize I'm not the speaker of the House of Representatives, but you can be a leader and have balance. Whether you loved President Obama or whether you love President Reagan, a lot of people would like one or the other. They both had the discipline to exercise every day, to have time off, to take family time, to set boundaries of when they start the day and end the day. Yes, if there's an international crisis, a war started, someone can wake them up at three in the morning, but they're not. They weren't sitting there scrolling their phone at three in the morning. And because of that, both leaders went down in history as being generally thoughtful and wise and on top of things and not overwhelmed. So, Mike Johnson, someone needs to, you know, some management expert needs to come in and give this guy some tips on how to manage his inbox, whether it's his phones, messages, his text or his email, because he sounds like somebody's just going to keel over and have his head explode. And I don't wish him ill or anyone else.