Trump endorsement already a headache for Paul Ryan
House Speaker Paul Ryan may have endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, but his office said Friday that he will not encourage other Republicans to support their party’s presumptive nominee.
And just one day after Ryan announced that he will vote for Trump, which came after a month-long standoff, the speaker denounced him for racially tinged criticisms of a federal judge.
During a Wisconsin radio interview with News Talk 1130 WISN, Ryan condemned Trump’s recent remarks questioning the fitness of U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel. Trump suggested that Curiel’s Mexican heritage was a conflict of interest in a civil case he is overseeing against the now defunct Trump University.
“The comment about the judge the other day just was out of left field from my mind,” Ryan said. “It’s reasoning I don’t relate to. I completely disagree with the thinking behind that.”
Ryan said that the comment was evidence that Trump “clearly says and does things I don’t agree with, and I’ve had to speak up from time to time when that has occurred.”
Indeed, before Ryan said a month ago he was not ready to endorse Trump because he had concerns about his commitment to the Constitution and to conservative principles, he had publicly criticized Trump on several occasions.
“I’ll continue to do that if it’s necessary. I hope it’s not,” Ryan said Friday.
But it’s not as if Trump’s comments on Thursday could have caught Ryan by surprise. Trump first complained about Curiel back in February, and even then questioned his ability to preside over the Trump University case based on the fact that Curiel, who was born and raised in Indiana, is Latino.
“There’s a hostility toward me by the judge, tremendous hostility, beyond belief. I believe he happens to be Spanish, which is fine, he’s Hispanic,” Trump said in February.
Trump attacked Curiel by name numerous times during a speech last week in San Diego, calling him “a hater,” saying “he should be ashamed of himself,” and again raising his ethnic background. And then in an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Trump said that Curiel had “an inherent conflict of interest in the case” because he was “of Mexican heritage.”
“I’m building a wall” across the U.S.-Mexican border, Trump said.
Numerous legal and political observers have noted that Trump’s attacks on Judge Curiel signal a level of disregard for the independence of the U.S. judiciary, which is one of the three coequal branches that check and balance each other. America’s founding fathers created the nation’s constitutional system with the intent to prevent excessive power from being concentrated in any one place in the government, and to insulate the government from being overly responsive to popular passions.
Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to act unilaterally as president. He has talked about forcing members of the military to commit war crimes and making it easier to sue media organizations. He has also publicly threatened critics.
Political experts have noted that if Trump won the election this fall, he could attempt to use his massive public platform and celebrity, as well as the substantial powers of the federal government, to go after those who do not support his agenda.
Ryan said Friday that he had spoken with Trump about “executive overreach” and found the businessman and reality TV personality responsive to his concerns.
But many conservatives sympathetic to Ryan believe that Trump’s assurances are worthless, because Trump has repeatedly shown a tendency to backtrack on his own statements. Ryan boosters expressed bafflement over the timing of this week’s Trump endorsement, but some said they thought he was likely trying to protect his six-point reform agenda from Trump criticism as the speaker unveils each piece over the next three weeks.
“Our goal is to spend this summer and this fall talking with our fellow citizens about these ideas, about these principles, about these policies,” Ryan said.
If Ryan is attempting to insulate his policy agenda and tie Trump to it, then his endorsement of Trump was also a concession to political pressures. Ryan does not want to be blamed in any way for a Trump loss, because it would give oxygen to the forces that have created him. Many political insiders of both parties see Trump as a fool or dangerous, or both, and Republicans who hope or expect him to fail are mostly trying to get out of his way so that they can pick up the pieces after he loses the election this fall to Clinton.
And so, despite Ryan’s endorsement of Trump, he will also likely do as little as possible to support his candidacy. A Ryan aide told Yahoo News that he would not be encouraging other Republicans one way or another on whether to support Trump.
Ryan “was speaking for himself,” the aide said of the speaker’s Thursday op-ed, in which he said he would vote for Trump. “This is a decision individuals will make on their own. The speaker believes we need to be unified this fall to beat [likely Democratic nominee Hillary] Clinton.”
The aide also said that Ryan and Trump have had “approximately five conversations,” and that the “conversations will continue.” Ryan said Thursday in his endorsement of Trump that over the course of their conversations he had become confident that the governing agenda he is presenting, starting next week, would have a willing partner in Trump if he were to become president.
Ryan is rolling out the first of six agenda items — welfare reform — next Tuesday. He told Vicki McKenna of WISN that during his talks with Trump (including a high-profile face-to-face meeting at the Republican National Committee last month) they had reached “a comfortable understanding of each other, not just the two of us as people but just as the relationship between a Trump presidency and a Republican Congress.”
“At the end of the day, this agenda we’re rolling out — which is our conservative principles — it is clear to me that we have somebody who is a willing partner in advancing these things and I know for darn sure Hillary Clinton is going to go in the opposite direction,” Ryan told McKenna.
