WASHINGTON ― The increasing tension between GOP nominee Donald Trump and Speaker Paul Ryan hasn’t quite put House Republicans in a position where they have to pick sides ― yet ― but members say the internal strife between two chief GOP standard-bearers has damaged Trump’s electoral chances and weakened Ryan’s hold on the Republican conference.
“It’s great that they’re going after each other,” one GOP lawmaker told The Huffington Post this week, on the condition of anonymity to more candidly discuss the subtle hostility between Trump and Ryan. “If they kill each other, the Republican Party and America would be a better place.”
Lawmakers would mostly only talk on background, fearing that they would upset two sides of the Republican Party. But it’s clear that members sense the fault lines developing, even though almost every member we spoke to thought they personally could stay out of the feud.
“I don’t think they have to choose either,” one member said of House Republicans. “Trump is an idiot and is only hurting himself, but Ryan kind of did it to himself by playing around with his endorsement of Trump.”
The member continued that Ryan said he would support the nominee, and then spent nearly a month playing “some weird game of cat and mouse.”
“I just feel like I’m living in an alternate universe,” the member added.
“Hillary [Clinton] is such a bad candidate and we are spending our time talking about nothing. Maybe it’s a ‘Seinfeld’ episode.”
The conflict between Ryan and Trump dates far back, probably even before Ryan ever condemned Trump’s proposed Muslim ban. Things only got worse, however, when Ryan, who had maintained throughout the entire primary season that he would support the eventual Republican nominee, said he wasn’t ready to endorse Trump once it became clear that the Republican nominee was going to be him.
Ryan did endorse, eventually. But he has since continued to call out Trump for some of his more egregious actions (while somehow maintaining that endorsement).
Still, with Trump’s campaign looking ever more extreme, racist, misogynist, xenophobic, and now, disrespectful to veterans and Gold Star families, there’s been renewed calls for Ryan to ditch Trump ― something the speaker said was possible during a June interview with HuffPost.
Trump, meanwhile, either by his own political calculation or pure ignorance, seemed to support Ryan’s bombastic primary challenger, Paul Nehlen.
That tweet led to questions of whether Trump was endorsing Ryan. And Trump turned Ryan’s reluctance back onto the speaker, telling The Washington Post that he’s “just not quite there yet” on a Ryan endorsement.
Of course, if Ryan was thinking about withdrawing his support for Trump, the nominee would have just made that harder, as he could now claim Ryan’s reneged endorsement was over petty politics and not his longstanding disagreements.
Ryan’s primary, which is on Aug. 9, looms over this conversation, even as Ryan’s camp insists it’s confident he’ll beat Nehlen handily.
Nehlen has tried to use the division between Ryan and Trump to his advantage at every turn. For this story, Nehlen told HuffPost that it was “unsurprising that Speaker Ryan would behave in such a manner toward Mr. Trump, which is beneath the dignity of the office of the Speaker of the House.” (For the record, Nehlen criticized Ryan in June for sitting down with “the liberal, Trump-bashing Huffington Post” and asked why any Republican leader would “give The Huffington Post the time of day.”)
If Ryan is actually considering taking back his endorsement, the proper timing would be difficult. Withdrawing support before the primary might fundamentally change the dynamics of the race, while waiting until his primary is behind him could appear nakedly political too.
As bad as the relationship between the two seems to be right now, Republican members don’t foresee Ryan going back on the endorsement. Most think Ryan made his decision with Trump and won’t alienate a new set of Republicans by reversing course, though one member warned that, “as one of our more senior colleagues once told me: If you get in bed with the devil, you’d better be prepared to get screwed.”
Yet another Republican member said he thought Ryan, as a potential 2020 presidential candidate, had a vested interest in making sure that Trump loses to Clinton, but not too severely. “Paul Ryan wants him to lose by a little,” the member said. “[Ted] Cruz wants him to lose by a lot.”
No matter what happens, a common refrain among Republicans was that neither Trump nor Ryan would come out of their tiff looking all that good. Trump looks hypocritical for ever demanding Republicans unify behind him, two members said, and Ryan looks foolish for ever hopping on board ― particularly if he was going to make such a big deal out of his endorsement and become an arbiter of right and wrong in Trump’s often-absurd campaign.
Still, some members said they understood Ryan’s position, where he fundamentally disagrees with Trump but wants to avoid a down-ballot bloodbath by giving Republicans license to stay home in November.
Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.), one of the few members willing to go on the record to offer his thoughts on Ryan and Trump, said unity at the top was of the utmost importance. “Republicans have to get together or Bill Clinton will be the first husband,” Duncan said, adding, “Even if the Republican conference can only work with Trump on 50 percent of the issues, that is 50 percent more than it would be able to work with a Clinton White House.”
The members who did speak on the record largely downplayed the drama between Trump and Ryan. Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), who took down former Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his primary, said the “choice between personalities is overplayed,” and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) said his focus was on his own race and that voters knew enough about Trump and Ryan “to make an informed decision without need of any insight from me.”
Ryan insisted in June that Trump did not have “a blank check” with his endorsement, but he said he didn’t know where that line was where he would withdraw his support.
One would imagine that Trump has to be toeing that line, between his sustained attacks on the Khan family, claims that U.S. elections are rigged, blame of sexual harassment victims, and apparent questions about why he can’t use nuclear weapons to annihilate enemies.
For any normal presidential campaign, this would be what an implosion looks like. For Trump, it’s a Wednesday.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.