Since Mr. Trump’s election in 2016, Republican congressional leaders have had to cultivate some kind of working relationship with him. But Mr. Johnson, who defended the former president in two Senate impeachment trials and played a lead role in trying to help him invalidate the 2020 election results, is positioning himself as the first speaker to be in complete lock step with the former president.
The meeting at Mar-a-Lago was reported earlier by Punchbowl News.
Last week, Mr. Johnson officially endorsed Mr. Trump — a move former Speaker Kevin McCarthy resisted even while proclaiming that the former president would be the Republican nominee and would be re-elected.
“I wholeheartedly endorsed him for re-election in 2020, and traveled with his team as a campaign surrogate to help ensure his victory,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement to The New York Times. “I have fully endorsed him once again.”
The endorsement came in response to a report by The Times that in 2015, Mr. Johnson had posted on social media saying that Mr. Trump was unfit to serve and could be a danger as president.
“The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House,” Mr. Johnson wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook on Aug. 7, 2015. “I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief.”
