Mke Johnson

 Time-  "Don't you ever want revenge?" Donald Trump asked Mike Johnson.

It was late May, and the President was in the Speaker’s office venting about House Republicans who were standing in the way of his signature tax-and-spending legislation, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. Trump was half-kidding, but he expected allegiance, not agita. Johnson explained that seeking vengeance cut against his Christian faith. When the President gave him a stone-faced look, the Speaker offered a more practical reason: with a narrow majority, vendettas aren’t an option. “We don’t have the luxury,” he told Trump.

Johnson became Speaker of the House in October 2023, emerging from relative obscurity to take what one of his Republican predecessors, John Boehner, calls “the toughest job in America.” It requires managing a conference that has for years been nearly ungovernable, while pleasing a President who expects total obeisance and tends to turn on congressional leaders who don’t deliver on his demands. Expectations for Johnson in Washington were low.

But he has defied them. Since Trump’s Inauguration, Johnson has shepherded a series of wins for the White House: thwarting a vote blocking Trump’s sweeping tariffs, passing the Laken Riley Act expediting the deportation of arrested migrants, averting a government shutdown, and delivering pro-crypto legislation that blesses certain digital assets tied to the U.S. dollar.

Trump’s megabill was on a different scale, a nearly $4 trillion supply-side bet that lower taxes for Big Business and the rich can stimulate enough economic growth to offset dramatic cuts in basic services for the poor. It slashes support to states for their Medicaid and food-stamp programs, and enforces work requirements that could strip health care coverage from an estimated 11.8 million people. It allocates $170 billion to complete a southern border wall and turbo-charge Trump’s deportation operations. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) -estimates the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will add $3.4 trillion or more to the national debt over the next decade. (Johnson argues it will do the opposite.) In the weeks before it came to a vote, polls showed that more than half of Americans opposed it.

But Johnson got it done. “It was very methodical, step by step,” the Louisiana native tells TIME on July 8, sitting in his ornate Capitol office, where a framed LSU football jersey with Mr. Speaker on the back hangs behind his desk. It took quiet negotiations with competing House factions; a high-stakes roll of the dice on the House floor; and, most of all, leveraging Trump’s popularity to pressure dissenters. “Getting the One Big Beautiful Bill across the finish line,” Vice President J.D. Vance tells TIME, “was a defining moment of his speakership.”