Democrat says Johnson is Trump’s ‘no boy’ on border talks

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) slammed Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) as former President Trump’s “no boy” over the border talks, after the Speaker said if legislation passed the Senate, it would be “dead on arrival” in the House.

“The Speaker said no because Donald Trump said no. The Speaker is Donald Trump’s no boy, OK,” Moskowitz told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Wednesday.

While the text of the border deal being drafted in the Senate has not been released, Johnson said that if what he had heard about the deal is true, the bill would be dead once it came to the lower chamber.

In a press conference Tuesday, the Speaker denied that his resistance to the bipartisan deal was an attempt to help Trump. Johnson said the accusation that he was helping the former president was “absurd” and said his duty is to the American people.

Trump, who is the front-runner for the GOP nomination, has urged Republicans, and specifically Johnson, to reject the deal and deny the Biden administration a legislative win ahead of the election.

In the Wednesday interview, Moskowitz said he wanted to “give Republicans credit” over the back-and-forth on border negotiations that have been going on for months.

“They have been highlighting the border for a long time, OK, and we were late,” he said of the Democrats. “We were late to start addressing, but now that we want to address it, now that we want to lower the amount of fentanyl coming in, now we want to deal with nondocumented folks, now we want to deal with supposed terrorists potentially coming into the country, now Republicans, controlled by one man, are saying, ‘No, no, no, we need this for the next 10 months.’”

“Both things are true here,” the Florida Democrat continued. “This is why people hate Washington. Both things are true.”