Boehner says he voted for Trump, didn’t push back on election claims because he’s retired

Former House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) revealed in an interview with Time magazine that he voted for former President Trump in the 2020 election and said he does not wish he was more involved in pushing back against Trump’s efforts to overturn the election even after the Jan. 6 insurrection.  

The interview, conducted the day before the release of Boehner’s book “On the House: A Washington Memoir,” the Ohio Republican said he decided to support Trump in the election because his policies largely mirrored ones he believed in.

“I voted for Donald Trump. I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in,” Boehner said.

Boehner said he supported Trump’s Supreme Court choices, adding that federal court nominees are “the most important thing a president does.”

“I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a President does,” he continued.

Boehner, Time magazine noted, did not endorse anyone in the 2020 presidential election. A spokesperson for Boehner in August said, “I think he’d rather set himself on fire than get involved in the election,” NBC News reported.

Boehner said he did not wish he had weighed in more on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, including following the Jan. 6 insurrection, because he wanted to “stay out of the day-to-day rumble of politics.”

“I really didn’t need to speak up,” Boehner said.

“At some point [in 2018], somebody asked me about the state of the Republican Party, and I said, ‘The Republican Party’s taking a nap.’ I wrote to my staff several days after January 6, I said, ‘I called it a nap but now it’s become … I might have said crisis,’ ” he added.

Days after the insurrection, Boehner tweeted a condemnation of the attack and denounced the Republican Party, and he sent an emotional email to an informal group of friends, allies and former aides he refers to as “Boehnerland.”

I once said the party of Lincoln and Reagan is off taking a nap. The nap has become a nightmare for our nation. The GOP must awaken. The invasion of our Capitol by a mob, incited by lies from some entrusted with power, is a disgrace to all who sacrificed to build our Republic.

— John Boehner (@SpeakerBoehner) January 7, 2021

In an interview with USA Today, Boehner said Trump “stepped all over their loyalty” when he peddled claims of voter fraud to his followers after the November election.

“What struck me, especially after the election, was, here’s all these people loyal to Donald Trump, and he abused them,” Boehner said. “He stepped all over their loyalty to him by continuing to say things that just weren’t true.”

In the book, which is scheduled to be released Tuesday, Boehner offers his commentary of a number of Washington power players. He called Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) a “reckless asshole” and former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) a “lunatic,” and he said conservative pundits such as Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh are residents of “Looneyville.”

Boehner also called the claim of election fraud pushed by Trump a “bullshit” lie and said he incited the “bloody insurrection” in January “for nothing more than selfish reasons.”

The Ohio Republican was ousted from the speakership in late 2015 amid an internal revolt by conservative House GOP members over a fight to avert a government shutdown.