This actually happened on Thursday of last week as an ascendant conservative majority celebrated at CPAC. Johnson took time out from the budget negotiations to do a 18-minute interview with Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt.

He’s talking about the early days of the second Trump administration and the efforts at government efficiency and scrubbing waste, and moved on to other topics.

Johnson talked about Ukraine and Trump’s effort at making peace there. He called it a “level set” that the President is working on by meeting with the Russians and Ukraine’s president separately and said Trump needs space to work the negotiations. Johnson also said there is “no appetite” for more Ukraine funding.

And then he talked about the “one big beautiful bill” and the effort being made to codify as much of Trump’s agenda as possible in one piece of legislation, combining energy policy, a renewal of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, “taking a blowtorch to the regulatory state” and slimming down the federal budget with codifying a firm control on the nation’s borders. Johnson wasn’t a massive fan of the idea of giving taxpayers a rebate, noting the giant size of the federal debt and deficit and saying it’s a better idea to “pay down the credit card.”

Johnson also told the story of Joe Biden banning LNG exports, and his confronting Biden over that stupid move in a rare one-on-one encounter early in 2024 only to find out Biden didn’t know what he’d signed.

You could tell it was a first-day crowd at CPAC. There was polite applause, but the room wasn’t packed and Johnson’s applause lines were mostly the ones talking about Trump’s victory and early actions. For Congress, less so.

And that’s fair, seeing as though so far there aren’t quite that many wins under the belt. As Johnson noted, he has a mere one-vote majority in the House, which means the Senate is actually a more Republican body than the House is right now. Some of that will change when special elections take place and Republicans retake seats vacated with a few members of the House joining the Trump administration. Even so, Johnson has a noose around his neck that he’s hoping will loosen after the one big beautiful bill is passed and the positive momentum carries into the midterms.

As he noted, the Democrats are in awful shape, and that gives Republicans an opportunity to go on offense in 2026 and grow that majority. Johnson says that’s what he’s working on. But it isn’t easy.