It was early last week when Sen. Ron Johnson ran into a little unexpected trouble. The Wisconsin Republican was asked on CNN about fake electors from his home state being held accountable for their misconduct after the 2020 elections, and the senators sided with his partisan allies, condemning efforts to hold them responsible.
“These folks did nothing different than what many Democrats have done in many states throughout history,” the far-right senator said, peddling a plainly false claim.
Asked to back that up, Johnson added, “I didn’t come prepared, to give you the exact states. But it’s happened. It’s happened repeatedly. It has happened repeatedly. Just go check the books.”
There were, of course, no such books. The line the Wisconsin Republican pushed to a national television audience simply wasn’t true.
Soon after, Johnson turned to social media to offer a defense of his dishonest rhetoric, which also didn’t go well: Everything he said online was false, too.
So, after getting caught pushing misinformation, and then getting caught pushing more misinformation about his original deception, the GOP senator quit while he was behind — sort of. WDJT, the CBS affiliate in Milwaukee, reported late last week:
Sen. Ron Johnson said Friday claims he made earlier in the week about Democrats having used fake slates of presidential electors were “slightly wrong,” but defended the bulk of his comments.
“First of all, what I said was largely true, OK? It was a gotcha question,” Johnson said. “I came onto the show to talk about the border and Ukraine funding, and they asked me about this.”
But that’s not what a “gotcha” question means. The senator is a Wisconsin Republican politician who’s tied to the 2020 controversy surrounding fake electors. There were developments ahead of the interview about other Wisconsin Republicans and the fake electors scandal. It’s hardly outrageous to think he’d get a question about this during an on-air interview.
What’s more, if Johnson didn’t want to talk about this, he had plenty of ways to dodge the question. Instead, he voluntarily defended election wrongdoing and peddled false claims from recent history. That was his fault, not the CNN anchor’s. Johnson added on Friday, “I was slightly wrong that Democrats had repeatedly had alternate slates of electors when I was really, in my mind, on a gotcha question, thinking about and talking about how many Democrats have denied elections.” I’d love to know more about how the GOP senator defines “slightly.” He repeatedly insisted — and pointed to non-existent books — that Democrats had relied on fake electors, just as his party did during the 2020 post-election efforts to overturn the election results. That was the opposite of the truth. The honorable thing to do would be to own up to the mistake. Johnson apparently prefers to blame the question and claim he was only “slightly” mistaken.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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