Donald Trump and Mike Johnson Are Teaming Up on a Fantasy Bill for a Fantasy Problem

On Friday at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an addition to the GOP platform: allegedly soon-to-be-released legislation that would crack down on the alleged problem of noncitizen voting.

Noncitizens are already prohibited by law from voting in all federal and state elections. One attempt to estimate how often the law is violated, in 2017, found that there had been only 30 suspected cases of noncitizen voting reported in the entire country during the previous year’s election. Registering to vote at the state and federal level requires attesting to one’s citizenship, after all. (Except in North Dakota, where you can vote without registering, but still have to furnish ID and affirm that you are a citizen.) Johnson says the yet-to-be-released bill would establish a national standard of photo-ID requirements by which citizenship could be verified.

Apocryphal reports of large-scale voting by undocumented immigrants—they are often said to have been bused to polling sites en masse—are the right-wing election-season analogue to annual Halloween rumors about an impending murder spree at the nearest college campus. As in, it is mostly a dark fantasy. But that doesn’t stop Republicans from going all in.

At a meeting with members of Congress in 2017, Trump himself claimed that professional golfer Bernhard Langer told him that he had been prevented from voting the previous year in Florida by a long line of presumptively undocumented individuals who appeared to be from Latin America; it turned out that Langer is not a U.S. citizen either and had possibly told Trump a story he heard from someone else.

Johnson flew to Florida from Washington after a Friday-morning vote to make the announcement, whose actual purpose seems to have been to provide him an opportunity to have his photo taken with Trump in order to emphasize the president’s support for his speakership. Far-right members of Congress led by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene have threatened to move to “vacate” Johnson from the position if he helps pass a bill providing further funding for Ukraine’s military; according to Punchbowl News, Johnson has still not decided whether he will attempt to pass funding for Israel (seen as an increasingly urgent priority after this weekend’s attacks by Iran) and Ukraine in the same legislation.

Johnson’s purported backing of an “election integrity” bill, in other words, is a reciprocal gesture of support for Trump, who remains fixated on the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from him via widespread fraud. So, long story short, a possibly imaginary piece of legislation that would solve a definitely imaginary problem could be critical to ultimately preventing Russia from starting World War III by invading the rest of Europe. Something to keep an eye on!