The funny thing about the new, plucked-from-obscurity House Speaker, Mike Johnson—now dubbed “MAGA Mike” by everyone from Matt Gaetz to Joe Biden, especially as his history of ultra-conservative social views are unearthed—is that the guy was hardly even known inside far right circles prior to his speakership. Indeed, Johnson was never a fixture on the media circuit: no CPAC appearances, no hits on Fox News or War Room with Steve Bannon, not even any tweets from Donald Trump either damning or praising him.

But that doesn’t mean that Johnson was a total outsider. Even back in January, one well-placed conservative insider suggested that Johnson could take a tack that Kevin McCarthy seemed unable to navigate. “Whenever I’d bring up his name, people were like, Oh, no, he’s too low, too unknown. He’s just not a big enough player,” this person told me. “I thought that he was underrated and I thought he was somebody that could bridge the two factions within the G.O.P. caucus: the moderates and the more MAGA conservatives.”