WASHINGTON, Nov 14 (Reuters) – U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, the highest-ranking Republican in Congress, endorsed Donald Trump for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday. This unsurprising move underlines the grip the former president holds on much of the party.
“I’m all in for President Trump,” Johnson said on CNBC.
Johnson implied that he had “endorsed” Trump in the past, but it was unclear when he had previously done so. A representative for the speaker did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Johnson was elected speaker in October after a small group of Republican lawmakers deposed Kevin McCarthy, the previous speaker.
Before that, Johnson led efforts in Congress to support the former President’s legal challenges aimed at the 2020 election results. Following Trump’s defeat, Johnson crafted a legal brief, signed by 125 other House Republicans, that sought to persuade the Supreme Court to reject election results from several contested states that ended up going to Joe Biden on election night.
In the CNBC interview, Johnson defended Trump’s actions, saying the former president believed “deep in his heart” that the election was fraudulent, an assertion that has yet to be proven legally.
A recent Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll found that voters in swing states prefer former President Trump on the economy by 16 points on the economy, 18 points on immigration, 13 points on taxes, and 19 points on gas prices. The only metric by which Biden led Trump above the margin of error was abortion, for which the president led him by 4 points.
The Bloomberg/MC poll also found that the former President holds firm leads in those same swing states, such as Georgia, where Trump leads by 9 points, Arizona by 4 points, Pennsylvania by 3 points, Nevada by 4 points, Wisconsin by 2 points, and North Carolina by 9 points.
This poll followed two major national polls that included a CBS poll that found Trump currently holds a 3-point lead nationally over Biden and a CNN poll that has Trump up 4 points over Biden.
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