On this episode of Inside the War Room, Ryan Ray chats with Michael Johns National Tea Party co-founder. Ryan and Michael discuss the formation of the Tea Party, President Trump, China, COVID-19, and the Middle East.
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Michael Johns is a national co-founder of the U.S. Tea Party movement, a healthcare executive, and a former White House presidential speechwriter. He is widely considered one of the nation's most influential thought leaders, strategists and leaders on many of our nation's most pressing private and public sector challenges.
Michael has two decades of executive and managerial-level experience in several of the most important components of healthcare, including pharmaceuticals, medical devices and supplies, and home health and infusion and injectable therapies. As a member of the executive management team of Gentiva Health Services, he helped lead a quintupling of the company's market capitalization and a $450 stock and cash divisional sale of the company. He also has worked in management capacities with McKesson, the largest healthcare company in the world, and Eli Lilly and Company, one of the world's leaders in biopharmaceutical innovation and manufacturing.
In February 2009, Michael was one of several co-founders of the U.S. Tea Party movement, which has been widely described as the largest and most influential grassroots political movement in American history. The Tea Party movement has been credited with historic and shocking wins in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2010 and the U.S. Senate in 2014 and was a core part of the populist base that ultimately proved so vital to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential victory.
While most the Tea Party movement has been comprised of individuals new to political engagement, Michael brought extensive political and public policy experience to the movement's founding and leadership. He began his career as an editor of Policy Review magazine, published by The Heritage Foundation, and was later promoted to foreign policy analyst at The Heritage Foundation, where his leadership in support of the Reagan Doctrine policy of support for anti-communist resistance forces was widely credited with putting the former Soviet Union on defense globally and bringing the Cold War to a fairly quick and peaceful end in favor of the West. Michael was among only a few outsiders to the visit the frontlines of the Cold War conflicts in Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, and led the campaign for U.S. support to the anti-communist resistance forces in these and nations, including Afghanistan.
Michael went on to serve as a senior aide to former New Jersey governor and 9/11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean and then U.S. Senator Olympia J. Snowe, and was a White House presidential speechwriter to President George H.W. Bush. He also has served as director of a U.S. government-supported organization engaged in helping developing democracies establish the foundations of civil society and representative government.
On June 16, 2015, Michael was the first major national conservative leader to endorse Donald Trump's presidential candidacy on the first day of his presidential campaign, which proved helpful in Trump's ability to appeal to the party's conservative base and ultimately secure both the Republican nomination and presidency.
Michael has written for The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, National Review and many other major media outlets and is a frequent analyst and commentator for global and U.S. television networks.
He is a graduate of the University of Miami, where he majored in economics and graduated with honors, and also has studied at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.
Michael Johns National Tea Party co-founder