Rep. Ralph Norman: What Trump Told Me After I Voted Against Johnson for Speaker

Rep. Ralph Norman was on the House floor Jan. 3 when Rep. Nancy Mace, a fellow South Carolina Republican, phone in hand, told him that President-elect Donald Trump wanted to speak with him. Norman had just voted for Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to become speaker of the House, rather than Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La.

For this week’s episode of “The Signal Sitdown,” Norman joins Daily Signal Politics Editor Bradley Devlin to explain why he initially voted against giving Johnson a second term as speaker, to share the inside story on how he went from a “no” to a “yes” on Johnson, and to pull back the curtain on an exclusive meeting Trump held with House conservatives at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on Jan. 11.

“I had one chance when we voted for the speaker to use my one vote out of 435 the way I thought it should be used, and I voted against [Johnson]. I voted for Jim Jordan,” Norman said.

“Nancy Mace handed me the phone,” Norman recalled. “She said, ‘the president wants to talk to you.’”

The first thing Trump told Norman? “‘You’re interrupting my golf game,’” the South Carolina lawmaker said with a smile. “I said, ‘Well, Mr. President, I hate to be doing that.’”

“‘Mike’s the only one that can win it. Jordan can’t win it,’” Trump said in Norman’s retelling, “‘I love Jim Jordan more than you do.’” 

“I said, ‘Mr. President, I get that, but you need to be calling Mike Johnson and going over where is he going to take a stand on [budget] offsets,” Norman claimed. “And that’s why we’ve got the $38 trillion in debt.”

Trump agreed Johnson and his House objectors should meet. In a side room, Norman, Johnson, and others huddled around the phone with Trump on speaker.

“I said, ‘Mike, are you going to not put any more suspension votes up where more Democrats vote for it than Republicans?’” Norman recalled. “’Before you spend another dollar, are you going to have it offset with cuts?’”

“After we talked back and forth, he said, ‘Yes.’” Norman claimed. “He said, ‘I will do that, and if I don’t, you can put me out,’” essentially promising to make good on his promises to conservatives or suffer going the way of his predecessor, former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.

“You do get threatened,” Norman said of withholding his vote for Johnson. Norman told The Daily Signal that after the speaker fight, he was threatened with a primary from various interest groups.

“That’s fine,” the South Carolinian said of the interest-group threats. “Competition is good. I’ve always had competition. That’s what makes us better. And it’s the people’s seat. If they want somebody else, if they think my vote against Mike Johnson in the 90 minutes that it took swayed them to never vote for Ralph Norman, that’s their [right]. I respect their opinion.”

“It took 90 minutes,” Norman said. “Is that worth sending a message, to me, in my one vote? Yes. Now, others don’t feel that way, and I understand that. I value their opinion, but nobody’s going to take my vote away from me.”

“Even though we’ve got a slim majority, we’ve got the gavel,” he added. “We’ve got to use it. And [Johnson has] got to use the leverage he has as speaker.”

Not long after, on Saturday, Norman and conservative House colleagues met with the president at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s estate.

“Donald Trump is an amazing man. What is he, 78?” Norman said. “What struck me is, he is enthusiastic about what he’s about to do. He’s enthusiastic that people took the time to come down there, and he’s enthusiastic about righting, really, the wrongs that have been done to him personally.”

“What was on my mind, and I brought it up, I said, ‘I really hope you can give Mike Johnson a spine and have him sell your ideas,’” he recalled.

Listen to the full episode here:

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