Mike Johnson Is Practically Unrecognizable In Bearded Throwback Pic With His Wife
Aside from cementing himself as one of Donald Trump's cabinet members who are trying way too hard to inflate the president's overblown ego, Mike Johnson has also established himself as one of the most prominent faces of the Trump administration. The Speaker of the House of Representatives took a lot of heat for seemingly doing everything in his power to delay congress' vote to release the Epstein files, and even peddled the blatant lie that Trump's relationship with the disgraced financier was simply a ruse, that the president was an FBI informant working to expose his sex trafficking ring (Johnson later retracted the bizarre statement).
Like most of the people in the divisive leader's inner circle, Johnson has undergone quite the transformation — both physically and politically. A 2022 photograph shows just how much Johnson's appearance has changed. In a snap he posted to Facebook, the Republican politician poses with his wife at an event, and if we didn't know it was him, we would've scrolled right past it.
Johnson sports a beard in the snap, a different pair of glasses, and his signature gray hair has yet to emerge. The snap might not be that old, but Johnson looks 10 years younger. Maybe working for Trump should come with a warning label. It's no wonder most of the people in the president's inner circle seem to have plastic surgeons on speed dial to keep their appearance youthful.
Johnson's beard isn't the only thing that disappeared
Mike Johnson got rid of his facial hair long before his colleague, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, declared war on beards, and while he might be in his MAGA colleagues' good books now, the speaker wasn't always a die-hard Trump guy. In fact, his previous views on the divisive politician echo that of Vice President JD Vance, who also has a complicated relationship with Donald Trump. As Johnson made a bid for congress in 2015, he posted critical comments about the former "Apprentice" host on Facebook. "The thing about Donald Trump is that he lacks the character and the moral center we desperately need again in the White House," the politician penned in the since-deleted post (via the New York Times).
Not everyone in the comments section agreed with this assessment, and Johnson clarified to one such critic that giving Trump presidential power would be dangerous, given his impulsive personality, arguing, "I am afraid he would break more things than he fixes. He is a hot head by nature, and that is a dangerous trait to have in a Commander in Chief." Naturally, Johnson seems to have changed his mind since. The speaker attempted to aid Trump in trying to overturn the 2020 election by peddling conspiracy theories, asserting that Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems had been part of an elaborate plot to convert votes for Trump into votes for Joe Biden.
"The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there's a lot of merit to that," Johnson said during a radio interview at the time (via X, formerly known as Twitter). These allegations were proven false. It appears the values Johnson held dear in 2015 went the way of his beard.