In an interview published Sunday night in Politico, former House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) tore into a few of his former Republican colleagues in the House and blamed the increasing divide between the right and the left on the rise of talk radio and social media.
Boehner confirmed his unhappiness with former Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), who chaired the House Oversight Committee and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), a co-founder of the House Freedom Caucus.
“Fuck Jordan. Fuck Chaffetz. They’re both assholes,” Boehner told Politico.
He called Chaffetz a “total phony” and said it was “always about Chaffetz.”
“Jordan was a terrorist as a legislator going back to his days in the Ohio House and Senate,” Boehner added. “A terrorist. A legislative terrorist.”
The former speaker sometimes offers advice to his successor, House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). Boehner told Politico that former President George W. Bush called him up over the summer and asked, “Hey, are you talking to Ryan? Are you giving him advice?” Boehner told Bush that he does give advice to Ryan, to which Bush replied, “He needs to call you more.”
Boehner also addressed the Republican party in the age of President Donald Trump.
“Donald Trump’s not a Republican. He’s not a Democrat. He’s a populist. He doesn’t have an ideological bone in his body,” the former speaker said.
Asked to name the leader of the Republican party, Boehner replied, “There is nobody.”
He told Politico that when historians discuss the end of his speakership, “they’ll be talking about the end of the two-party system.”
He blamed the divide in the country on the rise of talk radio and social media, not on Obama or Trump.
“People thought in ’09, ’10, ’11, that the country couldn’t be divided more. And you go back to Obama’s campaign in 2008, you know, he was talking about the divide and healing the country and all of that. And some would argue on the right that he did more to divide the country than to unite it. I kind of reject that notion,” Boehner told Politico.
“Because it wasn’t him!” he continued. “It was modern-day media, and social media, that kept pushing people further right and further left. People started to figure out … they could choose where to get their news. And so what do people do? They choose places they agree with, reinforcing the divide.”
Boehner said that conservative talk radio has drifted further to the right.
“I always liked Rush [Limbaugh]. When I went to Palm Beach I would always meet with Rush and we’d go play golf. But you know, who was that right-wing guy, [Mark] Levin? He went really crazy right and got a big audience, and he dragged [Sean] Hannity to the dark side. He dragged Rush to the dark side. And these guys—I used to talk to them all the time. And suddenly they’re beating the living shit out of me,” he said.
“I had a conversation with Hannity, probably about the beginning of 2015. I called him and said, ‘Listen, you’re nuts.’ We had this really blunt conversation. Things were better for a few months, and then it got back to being the same-old, same-old. Because I wasn’t going to be a right-wing idiot,” Boehner added.
The former speaker told Politico that it will take a “cataclysmic” event for Americans to come together again.
Despite his criticism for Trump and Republicans, Boehner told Politico that Trump is not racist.
“I do not believe that he is a racist. I do not believe that he is a white supremacist,” he said. “He has clearly done some things to lead people who never liked him to say those things about him.”
