Tomorrow, all eyes in Washington will be on the meeting between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan. Some Republicans hope this "summit" between two of the leaders of the Republican Party will signify how the party as a whole will move forward with Trump as the presidential nominee. Ryan surprised some last week by his refusal to endorse Trump -- yet. The big question is whether the two will exit the meeting with their arms around each other (figuratively if not literally), step to the microphones and announce that Trump will support Ryan's congressional agenda while Ryan will support Trump's candidacy. Anything short of full-throated enthusiasm for each other will be big news, to put this slightly differently.
Putting aside the question of what they'll do for the cameras after the big meeting, it's pretty easy to see what each of them wants from the other. Neither would fully admit to these positions in public, of course, but anyone who has watched the two men's political careers for the past year can tell what they're both hoping for.
Trump's goals are the easiest to understand. He wants congressional Republicans to support his candidacy. He wants a big, beautiful convention, unmarred by any tinge of intraparty feuding. He wants, essentially, to be left alone to campaign how he sees fit, but he also (if he's as smart as he thinks he is) wants the built-in Republican Party "ground game" to eagerly work for his candidacy to turn the voters out in November. Beyond that, he's probably pretty flexible on a wide range of hot-button political issues. Trump hasn't exactly been a paragon of consistency so far, so you'd have to assume he'd be open to at least softening some of his stated positions (outside of the ones he's never going to revisit, like building a wall on the Mexican border).
Ryan, on the other hand, has more complex and nuanced goals. His main concern, of course, is preserving and protecting his House majority in the upcoming election. Presiding over a historic loss of the House majority wouldn't exactly further his career much, to be blunt. So he's most concerned with getting Republicans elected (and re-elected) to House seats.
Ever since he reluctantly took the job, Speaker Ryan has had a vision of how the Republican Party can re-invent itself as "the party of ideas." He (quite rightly, in my opinion) saw that Republicans had descended into being nothing more than the "party of NO" pretty much ever since the Tea Partiers came to town. Republicans (especially in the House) define themselves nowadays by what they are against, so Ryan took it as his mission to flip that so the party could be for an agenda that (hopefully) the American people would agree with. A lofty goal, to be sure.
Ryan's problem, so far, has been that this has proven to be tougher than it sounds (and it sounds mighty tough, to begin with). He's already backed down from his initial stated goal of passing this agenda as a handful of bills, and sending it all to the Senate for action. Recently, he was backpedaling furiously and setting the bar quite a bit lower -- he will now only be putting out "white papers" rather than actual legislation, which will be vague on "areas that could be politically treacherous," and (the real admission of defeat) "it is unlikely that major parts of the agenda will actually be brought up for a vote before November." Got all that? The shining, positive agenda for Republicans to march into the twenty-first century is now going to be a couple of short position papers without details, which won't be voted on. The reason is patently obvious: the Republican agenda simply is not going to be popular, when people read the details.
Ryan was already desperately trying to achieve at least a partial victory by getting his fellow Republicans on board with any sort of agenda, no matter how vague. Then came the problem of Trump. Ryan's goal at this point was to somehow co-opt the meat of Trump's campaign platform. Ryan would offer Trump a prepared ready-to-go platform, which Trump could at least publicly say some nice things about, before he started ignoring large parts of it. This way, congressional Republicans could actually drive the Republican agenda. Ryan's dream would be of personally writing the platform document that is agreed to at the convention.
This is one of those things that wonky political types care deeply about, but that the rest of the public simply does not pay the slightest attention to. The party platform is a time-honored tradition reaching back in the annals of American history, but what is obvious to just about everybody is that it has become a completely meaningless exercise. Nobody -- and I mean nobody -- ever reads party platforms nowadays. Trump likely knows this, so what does he care what the party bigwigs throw into it? He can pick and choose which parts he will personally support, and it likely won't cost him any votes in the end.
Ryan is playing a much longer game than just getting through November, though. His ultimate goal is clearly to run for president himself at some point (2020, if Trump loses). His more immediate goal is to somehow survive the whirlwind of Donald Trump's candidacy, and pick up the pieces afterwards. By showing that he can get his House Republicans on board with a solid agenda, he was going to be the obvious savior of the party, after Trump loses to Clinton. That's been Ryan's plan for a while, now.
But Ryan's playing from a weak hand at this point, which is why it'll be interesting what happens at (and after) the big Trump meeting tomorrow. Ryan hasn't managed to put together six or seven bills that triumphantly show the voters what the Republican Party stands for. Just because John Boehner's gone doesn't mean the House Republicans have gotten any less contentious among themselves. Being balked by the Tea Party, Ryan dialed back expectations for his big agenda project, but it still does not actually exist on paper yet (indeed, not a single agenda item has appeared, as a draft bill or white paper or in any other form). So Ryan can't exactly pull a Newt Gingrich "Contract With America" out of the hat, at this point. The best he can manage is to say on television that he's not yet ready to back Trump, and force Trump to come to Washington on bended knee.
Trump is likely pretty bemused by all of this. He has a real instinct for sensing weakness in others, which is what he's likely sensing now in Ryan. Trump will likely offer to toss Ryan a few bones (such as influencing the official party platform at the convention), but he's certainly not going to be tied down by Ryan's agenda. Trump will likely tell Ryan to his face that he'll only be supporting whichever pieces of Ryan's agenda that he deems acceptable. In fact, since the agenda is by no means complete, Trump may even demand he be allowed some input of what will be on that agenda. Perhaps Ryan will have to add "build a big wall and make Mexico pay for it" to his own agenda.
Trump, as the presidential nominee, now outranks Ryan in the party's hierarchy. Unless the meeting blows up in everyone's face (Ryan storms out, refuses to endorse Trump, and steps down as the chair of the convention, perhaps), Trump will probably allow Ryan some face-saving over his precious agenda. Ryan will be allowed to complete his work, while Trump will not be constrained by it in any way (no matter what he says to the cameras immediately after the meeting). Both men will, in their own ways, claim to have gotten the upper hand in the big summit meeting. Trump will win in the short term, and run his campaign any damn way he feels like. Ryan will likely win in the long term, because if Trump crashes and burns in November, he'll be the sole Republican leader left who has any idea of what to do next.
While the summit is high drama in D.C., it's likely to be quickly forgotten by the electorate. Ryan and Trump will hash out some way to live with each other for the next six months, but normal people won't be paying that much attention. Ryan's going to pretend to be a strong voice after the summit meeting is over, but the real test of that isn't going to be whether he can save face with Trump or not. It's not going to be his leadership of the convention, either. The real thing to watch over the summer is whether Ryan can get anything down on paper at all that House Republicans can agree to. His lofty agenda project has already shrunk considerably, and it might shrink even further -- instead of many white papers on individual issues, we might just end up only seeing Republicans put out a couple of pages of bullet points.
There are many reasons why Donald Trump has been so successful, so far. But the big reason he's been able to get away with making up a policy platform on the fly (often taking stances wildly out of sync with traditional Republican positions) is that Republicans just don't currently have a policy platform they can all agree upon. House Republicans, by their intransigence and refusal to agree on just about anything, have created the very vacuum that Trump is filling. Trump can take any position he wants on just about anything, and there is no strong response from a unified Republican Party dictating the official position -- because they don't have one. So watch for Ryan to tout some meaningless concession Trump has made tomorrow (such as the official party platform document), only to be contradicted within days by Trump's insistence that he's going to chart his own policy course, no matter what Ryan thinks. Whether Ryan wants to admit it or not, because nobody's currently steering the Republican ship, Trump is going to easily be able to grab the helm. And once he does, he'll be steering that GOP ship himself, at least until Election Day.
Chris Weigant blogs at:
Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant