WASHINGTON — This week, Speaker Johnson sat down with the New York Post’s Miranda Devine for a wide-ranging discussion on her new podcast, Pod Force One. They discussed how Republicans are reestablishing fiscal sanity in Washington, the future of the MAGA movement, Speaker Johnson’s roots in Louisiana, and what he believes is the secret to success.
Watch the full interview here
On restoring fiscal sanity in Washington:
We spend too much money. The debt is our number one national security threat and I came to Congress to solve it. The trajectory is not sustainable, but we can’t solve the problem overnight because it could took decades for us to get here. The big beautiful bill was a giant leap forward. We’re going to save over $1.5 trillion in spending. It’s the largest that any legislative body in the history of mankind has ever done. Is it enough? No. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it is a turn. I use the metaphor of an aircraft carrier for the US economy. You don’t turn an aircraft carrier on a dime; it takes a mile of open ocean when it’s at top speed. This was the first big crank on the wheel, the turn on the wheel that we’ve had in generations and now we have the next sequential steps to continue that.
The president and his administration came in, they identified these areas like USAID for example, which was just fraught with abuse and wasteful uses of taxpayer dollars. We were funding transgender operas in Peru, you know? And Congress didn’t know that which is one of the credits to the DOGE effort as they were able to crack the code, get inside the belly at the agencies and crawl through the data with magic algorithms and find these things. And we didn’t know. So we found that out…And that we hope is the first of a series of rescissions packages that come forward where we, again, in our sequential steps to getting back fiscal, fiscal sanity, that’s going to be a piece of it.
On the future of the MAGA movement:
I think the movement goes forward. It won’t be the same without him, but he’s done a recalibration of our party in many ways. We brought in new demographics, big groups of people that had not been with us probably since the early eighties under Reagan. We’re a working-class party, as we should be. We represent the core principles, and I’m one of the people who’s trying to keep us tied to the moorings. You know, the core principles of our party are the core principles of America. They’re the principles that made us the greatest nation in the history of the world, and we abandon them at our peril, you know? And so there’s a lot of competing ideas and different forces out there right now, but I think we got to hold on to the soul of the party because that’s what’s gotten us to this point.
On Speaker Johnson’s secret for success:
This probably defies conventional wisdom, but it’s a matter of faith. You just be faithful and humble and you be faithful in the little thing that God puts before you today, and then you trust him with the rest. I quote often, John Quincy Adams, he famously said, “duty is ours, results are God’s.” It’s a very liberating way to live, you know, and you just try to do your best every day, do your responsibility, do your duty, and then I let the chips fall where they may. I’m not the sovereign and I’m so delighted that I’m not.
I’m not sure anyone could navigate the modern speakership the way it’s evolved to today. Without that faith component, I’m not sure I would. Scripture says you love your enemy, of course, as yourself. We don’t have enemies in the building. They’re all colleagues. But it also says that you bless those who persecute you. You don’t keep a record of wrongs. The soft word turns away wrath. There’s so much wisdom in the scripture, and if you apply all that, it allows you to navigate very tricky waters and not take things personally.
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