Republicans on Friday were cringing at the thought of a Republican National Convention in July in which the chair of the event, House Speaker Paul Ryan, refuses to back his own party’s nominee, Donald Trump.
“It’s not going to look good when the guy who is waiving the gavel is like, ‘Screw you!'” one top GOP strategist predicted.
And that’s why Republicans believe Ryan will ultimately throw his support behind Trump’s probable nomination. Not because he wants to, but because he must.
Ryan’s “not ready to back Trump” announcement drew swift criticism from some party elders on Friday.
“@SpeakerRyan’s comments yesterday send the wrong signal. He’s speaker, he has an obligation to unify the party,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., tweeted Friday.
Some longtime senior House Republican aides were also lamenting Ryan’s anti-Trump announcement.
“It was a big mistake,” one GOP aide told the Washington Examiner. “Air your grievances behind closed doors rather than inflaming tensions further. What he did simply makes it harder to reach our political goals this year.”
By mid afternoon Friday, a meeting between Ryan and Trump was scheduled for this coming Thursday, to be refereed by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus. The RNC chair was among the first GOP leaders to call for the party to unify behind Trump after his Tuesday victory in the Indiana Primary cleared a path to the nomination.
It was followed by a more conciliatory tone from Ryan’s personal twitter account: “I’ve invited @realDonaldTrump for a meeting with GOP leaders next week, and I look forward to the discussion.”
Trump insisted Friday he has no plans to simply go along with Ryan’s agenda.
“I told Reince that I thought it was totally inappropriate what Paul Ryan said and thought it was good for me politically,” Trump said Friday in a statement provided to the Washington Post. “But Reince feels, and I’m okay with that, that we should meet before we go our separate ways. So I guess the meeting will take place and who knows what will happen?”
Strategists predict the two sides will reconcile despite big differences on tax reform and entitlement reform, two huge Ryan priorities, not to mention Trump’s plan to build a fence along the Mexican border and ban new Muslim entrants, which Ryan opposes.
“I do think Ryan can be won over,” Republican strategist Ford O’Connell, who worked on the McCain-Palin presidential campaign in 2008.
O’Connell believes Trump privately wants to establish a positive relationship with Ryan so he is able to win over conservatives and unify the party behind his campaign before the July convention in Cleveland.
“The next ten weeks are the most important ten weeks of the general election,” O’Connell said. “From now until the convention he has to unify the party behind him.”
As for Ryan, his goal is to keep a Democrat out of the White House, and make sure nothing erodes his majority in the House.
“If he is out there looking like he’s really having thoughtful discussions with Trump, it’s a lot easier when he makes an endorsement and has to drag Republican conference members along with him,” O’Connell said.
Rich Galen, a former top aide to Gingrich, told the Examiner that Trump “needs to decide if he needs Ryan’s endorsement; just as Ryan has to decide whether he wants to endorse.”
In public, Trump shows no signs of needing Ryan’s seal of approval.
“Paul Ryan said that I inherited something very special, the Republican Party,” Trump tweeted Friday. “Wrong, I didn’t inherit it, I won it with millions of voters!”
Galen said Trump and Ryan simply need to begin the reconciliation process when they meet this week, and that it shouldn’t be too hard to bring them together.
“As Trump becomes more familiar with the details of policy issues he will be more comfortable talking to Ryan about what they’re looking for from a Trump White House,” Galen said. “I don’t think this is going to be a very difficult situation to resolve.”
