Mike Johnson Won’t Say If Gavin Newsom Should Be Arrested, Will Say California Governor Should Be “Tarred and Feathered”
House Speaker Mike Johnson demurred Tuesday when asked about Donald Trump‘s threat to arrest California governor Gavin Newsom, saying it wasn’t his place to weigh in on such matters. But apparently, it was his place to encourage people to attack Newsom using medieval-era torture methods.
Speaking to reporters in Washington, Johnson was asked if the governor of California, where Trump deployed the National Guard over the weekend, “should face consequences in a legal way,” to which he responded: “Um, that’s not my lane. I’m not gonna give you legal analysis on whether Gavin Newsom should be arrested. But he ought to be tar and feathered, I’ll say that.”
Tarring and feathering is, of course, a form of public punishment popular in medieval Europe and later in the American colonies. It involved a person being stripped naked, covered in tar and then in feathers, and yes, it’s pretty wild for Johnson to throw that out there. Weigh in on the legality of the president of the United States having the governor of California arrested because the latter said the National Guard’s presence wasn’t necessary in Los Angeles amid peaceful protests over ICE raids? The Speaker of the House would never! Call for the vigilante justice against the governor of California? That’s well within the Speaker’s purview!
It obviously goes without saying that if Johnson’s counterparts in Washington called for a MAGA politician to be tarred and feathered the White House would be calling for their resignation. But since Johnson was talking about someone the president hates—and because this is exactly the kind of thing the president himself would and has done—it’s fine. The only question is whether the Speaker considered calling for Newsom to be drawn and quartered and deemed it a bridge too far, or if he’s saving that for a rainy day.
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