A top Republican is blaming his divisive, hate-fueled speech at the Republican National Convention on a teleprompter loading error.
Senator Ron Johnson told PBS NewsHour Monday night that he had intended to hop on the “unity convention” bandwagon in the aftermath of the attempted assassination on Donald Trump’s life. But instead, he read a version of the script that was practically the opposite, allegedly because of a teleprompter mishap.
“That speech was written last week. They literally loaded the wrong speech,” Johnson told the news outlet.
“I had taken that out. Instead I’d loaded about that we needed a somber moment in history. We should heed President Trump’s call to unite,” he said. “We must heal and unify this nation. I didn’t know how to take that out without screwing up the teleprompter.”
But those statements being there in error apparently didn’t stop Johnson from saying them anyway. In a four-minute speech on Monday, Johnson told the crowd of conservatives that Democratic policies pose “a clear and present danger to America, to our institutions, our values, and our people.”
Ron Johnson gets the RNC crowd fired up with some good old fashioned transphobia and QAnon dogwhistling
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 15, 2024
(also note that the "unity" theme is already totally out the window ... ) pic.twitter.com/sPWhn7D9qA
He further derided Democrats as the party of “open borders, reckless spending, weaponized government, and weakness on the world stage,” and promised that Republicans would repair “the damage done by Democrats” once again.
“Vice President Harris and President Biden,” Johnson said, “have made our lives less safe and more expensive.”
The solution to all this, according to Johnson, was another four years of Trump. In closing out his speech, Johnson referred back to Trump’s slogan: “Make America Great Again.”
Johnson’s aides reportedly washed their hands of the incident, telling the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that if anyone was going to take the fall for the teleprompter loading error, it would be “not us.”
