Speaking to the Mainstream Media, ABC News’ This Week, alongside Rep. Adam Schiff, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan went on an anti-Trump tirade and unveiled his anti-Trump agenda.
He began by saying that he thinks Trump would lose in 2024 when speaking with NBC’s Karl, saying:
We probably likely lose the White House. We just did in ’20. So, I think we probably lose the White House with Trump. And if there’s someone not named Trump, my guess is we win the White House.
Then, after a bit more back and forth with Karl about Trump losing, Ryan said that he thinks support for Trump will continue declining, saying:
That’s right, but I think — I think he’s going to continue to lose altitude because we want to win. And we know with him we lose. We have a string of losses to prove that point. And there are a lot of really good, capable conservatives who people I think like that are more than capable of not only being good conservatives in office but can win elections.
Ryan then went on to say that he is a “never-again-Trumper,” saying:
I was – I – I governed with him. And I’m very proud of those days. I’m proud of the accomplishments of the tax reform, the deregulation, of criminal justice reform. I’m really excited about the judges we got on the bench, not just the Supreme Court, but throughout the judiciary. But I am a never-again-Trumper. Why? Because I want to win. And we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20, and now in 2022.
Returning to reality for a moment, Ryan did note that the GOP would have a hard time getting much done because of the razor-thin majority it has in the House, saying:
Yes, you – you always have leakage. You — no matter what bill you’re going to bring to the floor, it is almost impossible with that tight of a majority to have just only your party passing legislation.
When I was speaker, we had better majorities, bigger majorities. We could pass bills on our own. But if you have such a narrow majority, it’s going to be really hard.
Having said that, there’s nothing as unifying as a really razor-thin majority. That is a unifying thing in and of itself. I’ve been in the House where we’ve had pretty tight majorities. Not this tight, but –
But then he returned to his head-in-the-clouds RINO track, saying that the party needed to unify around its moderate members from New York and California, saying:
Look, you run a coalition government when you’re speaker of the house, within your own party. And there are big — we just elected a bunch of new people from New York and California, from what I would call more centrist, moderate-leaning districts. Those are the majority-makers.
He added that “Kevin [McCarthy] understands that. So, you have to run a coalition.”
The interview came alongside Ryan’s release of a new, policy-focused book alongside other AEI authors in which he proposes…cutting taxes, particularly on stock market gains, but offers little of value for ordinary, non-oligarch Republicans in the way of policy proposals, as Breitbart pointed out, saying:
The book does not clearly offer to trade some of the donors’ goals to earn the decisive votes of ordinary Americans.
But it does offer a grand bargain between the establishment Democrats and establishment Republicans — new carbon tax-and-spend programs funded by Americans in exchange for investors getting lower taxes and a share of the carbon taxes.
“The bargain we … are offering our friends on the left, who are rightly focused on removing carbon from the atmosphere, is a better carbon policy in exchange for a pro-growth tax code,” Ryan wrote
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