President-elect Donald Trump said he will attend Jimmy Carter’s state funeral next week and predicted that only Mike Johnson could win the vote for speaker of the House of Representatives.
Entering a New Year’s Eve party at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Tuesday, a reporter asked if he planned to be present at Carter’s funeral at the National Cathedral on Jan. 9 in Washington.
“Yes. I’ll be there. We were invited,” Trump said, declining to say whether he had spoken to Carter’s family since his death.
At the gala attended by billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk, Senator Ted Cruz and other supporters, Trump was also asked what message he had for Republicans who did not follow his lead in supporting Johnson’s re-election bid for House speaker.
The election of the president of the Chamber is scheduled for Friday after the new Congress takes office. Trump’s support for Johnson on Monday was seen as crucial to the congressman’s hopes of keeping the job he took up in October 2023.
But the decision by 34 Republicans to vote against Johnson’s federal government stopgap funding bill in December raised questions about whether Johnson might struggle to win enough support for re-election.
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“I think they will support President Johnson,” Trump told reporters. “He is the only one who can win now. Almost everyone likes him. Others are very good too, but there are 30 or 40 people who don’t like them,” he said.
