I highly question the folks saying Ryan has no spine.
He clearly hates Trump but has a certain obligation to not publicly disparage him.
The Repubs shilling for Trump “'cause he’s our nominee” are the spineless cowards. They aren’t sending daily reminders that Trump is hugely flawed and dangerous, as Ryan is now doing.
I am deeply interested in knowing how you characterize a person who sends frequent (if not daily) reminders that he’s voting for a person who is yugely flawed and dangerous.
The question seems to be moving from whether Trump will fail to how many other Republicans will he take down with him.
What obligation? Party before country?
Don’t sound so surprised, NP.
I disagree.
Ryan’s position is complicated, but that reflects a calculated election and nomination process…which isn’t exactly complete yet, despite what the mainstream media has reported. Trump has technically won the nomination, according to current party rules. But the rules can also be changed, and I suspect that it is what Ryan is trying to suggest, that the rules change.
Ryan has an agenda that he wants to achieve. He is focused on that agenda in a way that few have ever been in recent memory. Most House speakers, majority whips, majority leaders get caught up in the parliamentarian aspects of the job and over time tend to abandon their core ideas and end up trying to bend according to the whims of the party. I don’t see Ryan doing that. I see Ryan trying to preserve his grand vision for implementing a long-term fiscal overhaul and the way that the US spends its money. Mind you, I don’t in any way, shape, or form support Ryan’s agenda. But I admire the way Ryan works.
Ryan “supports” the party nominee because he feels like he has to respect the voters who voted for Trump and nominated him according to the current rules. At the same time, the political system in our country, being the complicated system it is, has an ‘eject’ button in case the voters ‘get it wrong’ – and I think Ryan is among those who really believe that the voters indeed got it wrong this time. So while he respects the voters, he doesn’t respect their vote. He’s trying to straddle the line. I see nothing impure about what he’s doing. It’s very pure. Respecting democratic participation, even if you disagree with the vote, is an ethical position to take. You respect the voter without necessarily respecting the product of the voter. I think that’s Ryan’s position, and I respect it. Of course I hope the GOP implodes this fall, but that’s another thread of discussion. I think Ryan is basically one of the good guys, even if I think his economic ideas are crackpot material at times.
AFAICT, plenty of Republican politicians are anti-Trump because they don’t think he’s a true conservative. There’s been talk of him possibly having a “secret socialist agenda” and such. When Ryan says that others should “vote their conscience”, he’s only partly referring to Trump’s bigotry and total lack of competence. Ryan is also speaking to the concerns about Trump not being a real Republican; that he’ll abandon his clumsy positions on tax cuts for the wealthy and restrictions on abortion once he’s in office.
So yeah, conscience indeed. It’s probably 10% “bigotry is bad”, 10% “he’s drawing attention to our bigoted platforms and that’s bad”, and 80% “he’s really more of a liberal aside from the bigotry”.
There’s also the other side of this. If, as is likely, November turns into a train wreck for Republicans, no one wants to be perceived as having contributed to the train wreck by fracturing the party. I almost feel sorry for Ryan, much as I loathe the man. There could not be a worse time to be the most visible senior Republican.
You gotta dance with the one who brung ya, right? I mean, Trump’s the party’s nominee, for better or worse, and Ryan’s stuck with him. It’s the same sort of situation with the Bernie people and Hillary.
He’s only the Speaker of the House. Do you not understand that he has some obligation to not decimate the party he controls?
He’s doing as much as he can to make it clear he does not like Trump. His sustained reticence in not endorsing Trump early on is yet more evidence of this.
There are a lot of bad guys in this Trump debacle, but Ryan is not one of them.
If Ryan knew last year that Trump really would wind up as the nominee, what are the odds he would never have accepted the Speakership to begin with?
The fact that he did is the strongest indication that the Republican leadership really couldn’t believe that Trump would win out.
Supporting Trump is decimating the Republican Party.
When Ryan is reduced to saying things like “Donald Trump is incompetent and a racist and I expect he’ll break the law if elected. But I’m endorsing him anyway.” he’s destroying the credibility of the Republican Party.
Ryan should instead be protecting his party by publicly repudiating Trump. Hell, the Republicans in Congress have years of practice in being hostile to Obama; all they need to do is shift to a new target. They can even denounce Clinton at the same time. Ryan could make the policy of blind opposition look principled instead of partisan.
True, they all want to be able to say it’s 100% exclusively Trump’s fault and they had nothing, NOTHING! to do with it, and once more with feeling: * “if only we had run a Real Conservative™…”*
I’ve been thinking this myself. Don’t know if he has the guts for it, though.
Being on board the train when it gets wrecked is worse than watching it get wrecked from a distance.
Is Ryan going to lose the primary? He might just get beaten by Nehlen.
A recent poll has it:
Also, this is apparently an open primary - will that make a difference? If Ryan is primaried out, does he then go on a full-out assault on Trump? For that matter, if he wins his primary, does he then fully repudiate Trump?
Can we dare dream?
Trump was just saying good stuff about Nehlen today. Maybe that will make Ryan turn against him.
Here is Ryan’s secret plan: