The rolling fiasco of the leaderless Republican House finally came to a grinding halt today, when Louisiana Representative Mike Johnson assumed the mantle of speaker with unanimous GOP support. Johnson had briefly been preceded in this dubious honor by House majority whip Tom Emmer, who withdrew from the running roughly five hours after his nomination in an intimidating flurry of Trump-orchestrated MAGA outrage. Emmer’s turn in the barrel ran the length of a Tarkovsky epic, making the doomed prime ministership of Great Britain’s Liz Truss seem like a geological epoch in comparison.

Johnson had been the lone rival standing from an eight-member field when Emmer eked out a narrow conference victory for the speaker nomination, besting his Louisiana opponent by 20 votes—117 versus 97. Johnson’s conference nomination wasn’t much more convincing; he emerged with 128 votes from the 217-member conference, with 44 lawmakers voting “other” (43 of those votes went for Kevin McCarthy, who was deposed earlier this month in a procedural tantrum led by Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, in the wake of the continuing resolution McCarthy brokered at the 11th hour to avert a government shutdown).

It was no surprise that Johnson would prevail in today’s scheduled floor vote, mostly because House Republicans are too exhausted and whipsawed by their self-inflicted failures to offer much sustained resistance. Call Johnson the beneficiary of the “You had one job” mandate in the GOP conference. He also had the tacit approval of the real leader of the party. “I am not going to make an Endorsement in this race,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, before going to conclude: “My strong SUGGESTION is to go with the leading candidate, Mike Johnson, & GET IT DONE, FAST!”

No one, apart from sleep-deprived MAGA House members, should be relieved by Johnson’s ascension. Unlike Emmer, Johnson voted enthusiastically to decertify the results of the 2020 presidential balloting—and served as the most influential congressional strategist in the effort. As Trump toadies in the chamber scrambled for anything that might come off as a plausible justification for their betrayal of the democratic process, Johnson, a former constitutional litigator, furnished them with a serviceable alibi. It was delusional, like everything else about the failed Trumpian coup, but it would do in a pinch, on both the House floor and in cable green rooms: States could repudiate their election results, Johnson argued, because their legislatures hadn’t been granted the opportunity to approve the vote-by-mail protocols approved during the height of the Covid pandemic.

Johnson’s case, such as it was, rested on the bogus “independent legislature” theory holding that states could unilaterally program election procedures in pretty much any way they saw fit—a doctrine so counter-empirical and threadbare that even the hard-right majority on the US Supreme Court repudiated it in its 2023 Moore v. Harper ruling. Having Johnson in the speaker’s chair would greatly increase the odds that Trump would reprise the January 6 strategy in the wake of another election loss next year. One reason that the January 6 coup effort didn’t go further was then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s insistence on continuing the joint session of Congress convened to approve election results amid the chaos of the Capitol riot; it’s a colossal understatement to say that a Speaker Johnson would be unlikely to follow that precedent.

As former chair of the hard-right Republican Study Committee, Johnson will also keep the House’s business on its present rabid MAGA course, choreographing Hunter Biden witch hunts and serial bogus committee investigations of the FBI, Justice Department, and the IRS for trespasses against Trumpian orthodoxies—all while the government careens toward its next shutdown deadline in mid-November, and funding for Ukraine and the Middle East hangs in the balance. Johnson also comes bearing a pronounced animus against gay Americans, having litigated against LGBTQ+ civil rights in Louisiana and sponsored last year a national Don’t Say Gay bill in Congress.

The most glaring sign of Johnson’s unfitness, however, is the path he’s followed to his unlikely perch of eminence. His ability to change places with majority whip Tom Emmer was entirely due to the demagogic role Donald Trump played in the late stages of the speaker’s race.

On one level, of course, Emmer’s candidacy seemed the height of improbability. Nearly three weeks into the great Republican leadership rebellion, the bold forces of swamp-draining in the GOP House caucus came to consider replacing establishment sellout Kevin McCarthy with… establishment sellout Kevin McCarthy’s chief lieutenant, Tom Emmer.

Seen from another vantage, however—that of the traditional model of party leadership—Emmer would have been an entirely logical candidate to serve as speaker: the whip’s professional brief of vote counting is both a key requirement of the speaker job and a sound basis for the sort of sub rosa horse trading normally involved in building a base of support to win the speakership. But of course, today’s Trumpified GOP has no use for such traditional arrangements.

Still, Emmer had survived a MAGA-branded challenge to win the whip position in January, narrowly vanquishing Indiana Representative Jim Banks, who played up Emmer’s vote against decertifying the results of the 2020 election on January 6 to cast doubt on his loyalties to Trump. But as CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski has noted, Emmer did support an equally unhinged failed lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to throw out election results in all the country’s swing states—because that’s apparently what qualifies as a leadership credential in today’s Republican Party. (Meanwhile, Johnson filed an amicus brief in the same suit.)