Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who is currently hawking his new memoir, revealed to Time magazine that he voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Boehner has received largely favorable coverage for his book’s scathing rebukes of some Republicans including his characterization of the then-president inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, which Boehner wrote was “perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.”
However, Boehner told Time in an interview published Tuesday that he supported Trump’s reelection.
“I voted for Donald Trump. I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in,” Boehner said.
“I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a president does,” he added.
Boehner’s scorn for some fellow Republicans — including Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, whom Boehner describes as a nemesis inflicting harm on the Republican Party — and his condemnation of the Capitol riot have garnered the most attention during his press tour, giving some readers the impression that Boehner is a disaffected conservative.
For example, Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, called Boehner’s book “an extraordinary rebuke of the current-day GOP, an excoriation without precedent in modern times.”
But Tuesday’s revelation he supported Trump’s reelection shows Boehner is not at odds with the GOP at all ― not substantively, at least. More importantly, it shows he supports the anti-democratic practices that have become central to the GOP’s success. When Boehner cast his ballot for Trump in 2020, Trump had already waged a monthslong assault on voting rights and he’d been impeached for trying to extort Ukraine to help his reelection.
The former speakers’s support of Trump shouldn’t come as a surprise. Boehner left Congress and the national spotlight in 2015, but he remained a public Trump supporter throughout the president’s term.
In a 2019 interview, Boehner said, “Donald Trump, in my view, by and large, has done the right things.”