House Speaker Mike Johnson is a man of faith — a “Bible-believing Christian,” as he puts it, who by his own account does his best to reflect the fact that God is love, not hate.

“If you truly believe in the Bible’s commands,” the Louisiana Republican told Fox News last year, “and you seek to follow those, it’s impossible to be a hateful person because the greatest command in the Bible is that you love God with everything you had, and you love your neighbor as well.”

But Johnson is also a loyal ally of Donald Trump, a man who has repeatedly made false, outlandish and blatantly offensive claims in pursuit of political power, and has spent the last nine years blaming people born elsewhere for almost every problem facing America. But Johnson is far more than a modest disciple of a 78-year-old demagogue who hawks his own sacrilegious version of Christianity's sacred text, nor is he just another Republican who swallows his unease over the racist invective in order to get lower corporate taxes.

No, Mike Johnson is also in it for power. Like his party’s leader, he's given to self-aggrandizement (“entire industries,” he has claimed, are trying “to take down … effective political leaders like me”). In his uphill quest to preserve the Republicans' slender House majority and hold onto the speaker's chair, Johnson is participating — and even leading — a campaign of demonization directed at immigrants, one that he either knows is false or has somehow willed himself to believe is true. (Neither is an excuse, according to the dictates of Johnson's faith, that is likely to satisfy St. Peter).

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Speaking to Politico while on the campaign trail in Texas, Johnson this week reiterated a false GOP talking point he has echoed many times........

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