The real reason GOP Senator Ron Johnson is willing to go down with the sinking Trump ship

| 5:16 pm EDT October 6, 2019
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This week we saw a few Republican Senators begin to publicly place their bets on Donald Trump’s fate. Mitt Romney bet that he can be the 2020 Republican nominee for president if he can help take Trump down. Susan Collins bet that her feeble reelection chances in 2020 would be best served by criticizing Trump. John Cornyn bet that his 2020 reelection chances would be best served by loudly standing with Trump – for now at least.

Then there’s the curious case of Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who isn’t up for reelection for another three years, and would seemingly be best served by declining to take a side until he can see how this is all going to shake out. After all, it’s what Marco Rubio did yesterday when he tried to buy himself time by pretending that he thought Trump was merely joking when he tried to extort China into helping him promote the fake Biden scandal. So why is Ron Johnson making a point of setting himself on fire?

Sure, Ron Johnson is a close ally of Donald Trump. But there are a lot of Republican Senators who consider themselves to be close allies with Trump, yet aren’t willing to stick their neck out for him this time around. After all, Republicans are always in it for themselves when it comes down to it. Even Mitch McConnell isn’t offering any sort of defense of Trump’s actions, because he knows he might have to selfishly throw Trump overboard if this keeps getting uglier.

So even by selfish “I’ll do whatever I have to in order to get reelected” standards, there’s no real reason for Ron Johnson to be out there promoting Donald Trump’s deranged conspiracy theories, like he did this morning on Meet The Press. There has to be more going on for Johnson to have gone out there and done real harm to his own political prospects in the name of trying to prop Trump up.

The day before Ron Johnson’s Meet The Press meltdown, he publicly admitted that he’s known about Donald Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo for a couple months. The only reason for him to admit this is that he thought it was going to come out anyway, and he wanted to try to spin it in the best possible light. But still, if all that Johnson did was know about it, and if he indeed privately confronted Trump about it awhile back, then he should be in the clear – right?

There has to be more going on here. Ron Johnson doused himself with gasoline this morning and set himself on fire in the name of trying to remain in Donald Trump’s good graces. Johnson was performing for an audience of one. He seems to think that his only priority, at the expense of anything else in his life, is to keep Trump happy. What is Trump holding over his head? We don’t know. But we’d recommend starting by asking why Johnson spent last year’s Fourth of July 2018 with Vladimir Putin in Russia.