John Boehner On The 'Noisemakers' Of The Republican Party - NPR

He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted.

John Boehner, pictured in 2016, was speaker of the House during the Obama presidency.

He says he sometimes went along with things he personally opposed because it was what members of his party wanted.

John Boehner says he couldn't win an election as a Republican these days.

Boehner was first elected to the House in 1990 as a firebrand conservative from Ohio, rising to become House speaker with the help of Republican Tea Party victories in the 2010 midterms.

Boehner's retirement in 2015 allowed him to avoid working with former President Donald Trump in the White House.

Boehner tells NPR that when Trump refused to accept his election loss, "he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him.".

You describe the way that you ran meetings when you were speaker of the House or really in any leadership position?

Your party captured the House in 2010.

You make it clear that there are a lot of people in the Tea Party movement that you consider 'crazies.' But at the time, you made sure there was no distance, no gap between mainstream Republicans and Tea Party types.

Well, the fact is they got elected as Republicans, they were members of the Republican conference and most of those so-called Tea Party candidates became what I would describe as regular Republicans?

I get the impression, though, that you think that a lot of leading personalities in your party don't really stand for anything, don't really believe in anything?

So many people supported the effort to overturn the 2020 election

And, you know, there's always a few irregularities, but there's really been nothing of any significance that would have changed one state's election outcome, not one

I just find what President Trump did before the election, especially what he did after the election, he really abused the loyalty and trust that his voters and supporters placed in him by continually telling them that the election was going to be stolen before the election

And then after the election, telling them that the election was stolen without providing any evidence, no facts

And to see this loyalty and trust be abused by President Trump, it was really kind of disheartening at best