The latest outburst from House Speaker Mike Johnson is as predictable as it is dishonest. His denunciation of Democrats as organizers of a so-called “Hate America” rally is not just absurd—it’s a calculated distraction from his party’s moral and policy bankruptcy. He knows it, and so do the Republican strategists who feed these talking points to their base like fast food for the aggrieved. The real story isn’t about patriotism; it’s about priorities.
What Johnson and his colleagues hope Trump voters won’t see is that Democrats holding the line on a government funding bill are doing so to preserve Affordable Care Act subsidies—those very subsidies that keep health insurance premiums from doubling for millions of working Americans. Buried under the sloganeering about “runaway spending” and “socialist programs” is the inconvenient fact that ending these subsidies would devastate rural hospitals and drive up the cost of coverage not just for low-income families, but for middle-class voters in red states who depend on Obamacare to survive.
The hypocrisy is stunning. For more than a decade, Republicans have sworn to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act with something better. They’ve never defined what that “something” might be, because it doesn’t exist. Even Marjorie Taylor Greene—hardly a voice of moderation—has admitted as much. Her blunt acknowledgment that her own party has “no alternative” to the ACA reveals a crack in the façade that Johnson and others desperately try to paper over with culture-war noise.
Johnson’s “Hate America” rhetoric is designed to make his supporters angry, not informed. It’s meant to redirect their outrage away from the real consequences of Republican inaction: a healthcare system that would collapse in large swaths of the country without federal support, and a safety net that rural communities—his own voters—depend on. The Affordable Care Act, and the Medicaid expansion that followed, have kept hospitals open in areas where private markets failed. That’s not ideology; that’s math and mortality.
So when Speaker Johnson rails about patriotism, remember what he’s protecting: not the flag, not freedom, but a political strategy built on keeping Americans too distracted to notice who’s actually fighting for their health and livelihoods. The irony is that the so-called “hate America” crowd are the ones trying to keep the country alive.