The US House was in session on Tuesday with vital business to complete but its speaker, Mike Johnson, was 200 miles north, attending another day in the criminal trial of Donald Trump, the former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee charged over hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.
“President Trump is innocent of these charges,” Johnson said outside court in Manhattan, where Trump faces the first 34 of 88 criminal counts.
Michael Cohen, who as Trump’s lawyer and fixer made the payments to Stormy Daniels, was on the witness stand.
Trump has used his trial as a loyalty test for supporters and vice-presidential hopefuls, both at the courthouse and on social media and TV. On Tuesday, Johnson was joined by the governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum, the Florida representatives Byron Donalds and Cory Mills, and Vivek Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur who ran for the Republican presidential nomination.
Before proceedings began, as Johnson and other supporters stood behind him, Trump spoke to reporters.
“I do have a lot of surrogates and they are speaking very beautifully,” he said. “They come from all over Washington, and they’re highly respected and they think this is the biggest scam they’ve ever seen.”
Regarding such surrogates’ ability to comment on the trial unencumbered by a gag order over which Trump has been fined and threatened with incarceration, Trump told reporters: “You ask me questions that I’m not allowed to answer.”
Complaining about the courtroom, Trump said: “I’ve been here for nearly four weeks in the ice box.”
The charges against Trump cast the hush-money payments, made around the 2016 election, as a form of election subversion.
Trump also faces four federal and 10 Georgia state charges arising from his attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, and 40 federal charges concerning his retention of classified information.
He has also been hit with multimillion-dollar civil penalties, over his business practices and a defamation suit arising from a rape allegation a judge called “substantially true”.
Nonetheless, the devoutly Christian (and porn-monitoring) Johnson rushed to Trump’s side as Trump’s affair with Daniels, the star of films including Dirty Deeds and Right Amount of Wrong, was once more examined in court.
One of Johnson’s former Republican colleagues, the anti-Trump conservative Liz Cheney, jibed: “Have to admit I’m surprised that Speaker Johnson wants to be in the ‘I cheated on my wife with a porn star’ club. I guess he’s not that concerned with teaching morality to our young people after all.”
Back on Capitol Hill, the House was due to consider final passage of the Federal Aviation Authority Reauthorization Act. House Democrats were also set to face a series of messaging bills, proposed legislation designed not to pass but to ensnare the other party in difficult political choices.
“Otherwise,” Politico reported, “Speaker Mike Johnson is ready to move squarely into campaign mode.”
In Manhattan, Johnson – the only member of Trump’s cheer squad not to wear a distinctly Trumpian red tie – spoke to reporters. He said: “President Trump is innocent of these charges.
“It’s impossible for anybody to deny, that looks at this objectively, that the judicial system in our country has been weaponised against President Trump. The system is using all the tools at its disposal right now to punish one president to provide cover for another.
“These are politically motivated trials and they are a disgrace. It is election interference, and they show how desperate the opposition that President Trump is, how desperate they truly are.”
Johnson said he was making the appearance “on my own, to support President Trump, because I am one of hundreds of millions of people and one citizen who is deeply concerned about this”.
Johnson and his fellow visitors were not the first. On Monday the Ohio senator JD Vance gave his impressions of proceedings.
Vance posted: “Michael Cohen admitting he secretly recorded his employer. Just totally normal conduct, right? The best part is he said he did it only once and only for Trump’s benefit. A stand-up guy!”
Vance also called the trial “election interference”, because the gag order constrained Trump’s speech, representing “a violation of the constitution and an insult to the American people”.
Before court on Tuesday, Ramaswamy claimed a “sham trial” and a “politically motivated assault on the leading candidate for US president, greenlit by his political opponent, Joe Biden, and carried out at the highest levels of the White House and Department of Justice”.
Ramaswamy also attacked the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg; the prosecutor Matthew Colangelo; and the judge, Juan Merchan.
“The American people will deliver the ultimate verdict in November,” Ramaswamy said. “Say NO to the weaponisation of justice.”
Other surrogates also complained. Donalds, who as a young man had a marijuana charge dismissed and a bribery charge expunged, said proceedings against Trump represented “a tragedy for the American justice system”.
For Johnson, staying close to Trump has paid off, particularly as the speaker has overseen passage of government funding and military aid to Ukraine, neither favoured by Trump and his supporters on the far right of a far-right Republican party.
Last week, with support from Democrats, Johnson defeated an attempt to remove him mounted by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia extremist who has touted herself as a Trump running mate.
In a statement on Tuesday, Alex Floyd, rapid response director for the Democratic National Committee, mocked Trump’s need for “emotional support” from Johnson and others, and took a shot at the speaker for absenting himself from the House.
“Donald Trump is convening the saddest posse of Maga loyalists … desperate for emotional support and political cover as he spends another week tending to his personal affairs rather than talking to actual voters,” Floyd said.
“Trump’s pathetic band … seemingly have nothing better to do than echo Trump’s lies and nod approvingly in the background – because they certainly aren’t doing their day jobs of serving their constituents or running a functional political operation.”
