House speaker Paul Ryan all but cut and sprinted from the presidential race Monday, telling Republican members that he would spend the election’s final month working to preserve the party’s congressional majority instead of defending Donald Trump.
The GOP nominee for president interpreted the news as paraphrased “fighting” words. Some House Republicans were reportedly upset—for reasons of electoral politics and governance alike—that Ryan would abandon Trump. And it was with this split the party found itself pointing fingers, at each other and at panic buttons, with less than 30 days from what many conservatives worry could be a disastrous election.
“Do you know that moment when your car hits a patch of ice, starts to spin, and you’re hoping to survive the impact? That’s what this next month feels like,” a House GOP aide told THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Monday began with Ryan hosting a conference call with his caucus to discuss his plans and guidance for the 2016 campaign’s home stretch. Some of his members, including Jason Chaffetz of Utah and Alabama representative Martha Roby, had already withdrawn their support of Trump after news broke Friday of the hot mic moment that captured the candidate making predatory comments about women. Trump spent the opening segments of Sunday night’s debate addressing the matter, but eventually moved past it to deliver a performance his supporters said was more than sufficient and many observers said was coagulation.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for Ryan, who had uninvited Trump from a gathering of Republicans in Wisconsin during the weekend. Here’s the New York Times:
Trump, who helped raise the profile of Ryan’s primary challenger months ago, chided the House speaker over the news.
“Paul Ryan should spend more time on balancing the budget, jobs and illegal immigration and not waste his time on fighting [the] Republican nominee,” he tweeted.
The unrest comes amid the fallout from Trump’s infamous Friday. In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll conducted that day and the next, Hillary Clinton led Trump by 11 percentage points in a four-way race and 14 in a two-way race. Other poll results have indicated a shift in Clinton’s direction, although they only partially account for the Trump video and not for the debate.
The concern among congressional Republicans is obvious. Senate candidates in key battlegrounds have managed to run ahead of Trump’s polling numbers by various margins, but the presidential nominee hasn’t faced big deficits in most of those states. On the opposite side of the Capitol, Oregon representative Greg Walden, who heads the House GOP’s campaign apparatus, said the electoral data were trending negative for his members.
With the legislative branch under threat, Ryan has made an executive decision.
“The speaker is going to spend the next month focused entirely on protecting our congressional majorities,” his spokeswoman AshLee Strong said Monday.
