House Speaker Mike Johnson revisited the terrifying incident when his two teenage sons nearly drowned in a rip current just weeks into his speakership during an interview on “Pod Force One,” out Wednesday.
Johnson (R-La.) had been in Florida for a fundraiser during the week of Thanksgiving 2023, when his security detail burst into one of his meetings and informed him of the situation.
“They got pulled far out and they almost drowned,” the GOP speaker told Post columnist Miranda Devine about the chilling incident. “My … son [Jack] was holding his younger, 13-year-old brother [Will] up, and he almost drowned. And then the younger one almost did as well.”
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“Jack and Will. They went to the ER, had their lungs pumped. I mean, it was quite an ordeal.”
Details about his children’s close call were previously reported by The Atlantic last year. Johnson underscored the sheer strength of the current that took his children and how, by chance, a nearby parasailer happened to see them and save the day.
“They’re great swimmers, but the rip current was so strong that day, and they got pulled far, far out,” the father of five said.
“And the only reason they were saved is because a parasailer happened to be going by and saw just my youngest son’s head right before he went under, waving for help.”
That parasailer had alerted nearby lifeguards, who dispatched jet skis to rescue his young boys. By the time Johnson arrived on the beach, he saw medical personnel around them as their chests were getting pumped.
A year-and-a-half later, his son Jack, whom Johnson described as a “great athlete,” has since completed his first year at the Naval Academy and wants to become a member of Special Forces.
After having dinner with Johnson the night before, President Trump caught word of the scary incident and called him up about a day later.
“I didn’t even tell him,” Johnson recounted. “He was so alarmed by what he heard, and he said, ‘Mike, it’s like a miracle.’ I said, ‘It is. Had it not been for the parasailer, we would have lost both my sons.’”
“So fast forward to the Butler, Pennsylvania, event many months later, when that happened, when I spoke to him after that, I said, ‘God saved your life, just as he did my boys in Mar a Lago,’” Johnson added.
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The father of five stressed that “God works in mysterious ways sometimes teaching us all these lessons, but that was a tough one.”
On Sunday, Trump marked the one-year anniversary of the Butler, Pa., assassination attempt against him in which a bullet grazed through his upper right ear, coming within a quarter inch of killing him.
“He’s a different person now than he was in the first term,” Johnson remarked about Trump. “He’s more thoughtful, contemplative. He thinks very carefully about decisions and is open to counsel on it.”
