After weeks of infighting and debate, Republicans finally managed to elect a new House Speaker on Wednesday, naming Mike Johnson to the position. Of course, very few people have ever heard of Johnson, including some of his own colleagues — and Seth Meyers is pretty sure that’s exactly the reason he was chosen.
During Wednesday night’s “A Closer Look” segment, Meyers argued that there’s no clearer evidence that election deniers now control the Republican party than the fact that Johnson was elected. For those unaware, the congressman was a key figure in pushing Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies.
But, Meyers joked, that fact goes overlooked because of how generic Johnson is otherwise.
“I think they’re hoping to bore everyone into forgetting how extreme he is,” Meyers said. “Mike Johnson is the fake name they give you when you call tech support, so it sounds like you’re talking to someone in Kansas when you’re definitely talking to someone in Albania.”
Meyers also had a good laugh at the fact that even some of Johnson’s own colleagues had no idea who he is. The NBC host particularly zeroed in on a tweet from a CNN reporter on Wednesday, who wrote that, when asked about working with Johnson, Rep. Susan Collins admitted that she was going to have to look him up on Google.
“When you Google him, you’re going to need to put in more information than just the name ‘Mike Johnson,’” Meyers mocked. “Mike Johnson is such a common name, most of us went to school with one. My Mike Johnson played baseball, this Mike Johnson played a key role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results and was, according to The New York Times, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections on Jan. 6.”
You can watch Seth Meyers’s full “A Closer Look” segment in the video above.
