In one excerpt of his comments, addressed to College Republicans at the University of Wisconisn, Ryan warned of the consequences of a Democratic-controlled legislature paired with a Democratic president:
What vision do Hillary Clinton and her party offer the people? They want … an America that doesn’t stand out. They want an America that is ordinary. There’s kind of a gloom and grayness to things. In the America they want, the driving force is the state. It is a place where government is taken away from the people, where we are ruled by our betters, by a cold and unfeeling bureaucracy that replaces original thinking. It is a place where the government twists the law and Constitution itself to suit its purposes. It’s a place where liberty is always under assault—where passion, the very stuff of life, is extinguished. That is the America that Hillary Clinton wants. And if given control of Washington—if given control of Congress—it is the kind of America she will stop at nothing to have.
Ryan underscored the point later in his comments, taking aim at some of Clinton’s rhetoric this campaign and how it fits the mold of progressivism:
This is not about freeing you. It is about limiting you. There’s no room to run, no chance to grow, or to fail for that matter. People aren’t needed, they are counted and sorted. This is how you can so casually classify whole groups of people as baskets of deplorables. It’s how Hillary Clinton can so casually say, and I quote, “We are going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business,” as if government, that imperial “we” she was talking about, should be able to wave a just wand and put a whole industry of workers out of work. And it is how her associates can so casually say, as we learned this week, that a whole faith, a whole church, is severely backwards. This is the America that the left wants. And if Congress does not stand [against] this—and a Republican Congress will not stand for this—they will hire unelected bureaucrats to do their bidding and appoint activist judges to do the rubber-stamping of their designs.
The speech was broad and philosophical, and ignored Trump entirely. He didn’t mention the GOP nominee for president during the prepared portion of his comments, and no part of the subsequent Q&A with students—which comprised pre-screened questions—broached Trump, either.
Earlier this week, Ryan told House Republicans what he would and would not defend in the campaign’s closing stretch. He would focus solely on preserving his party’s congressional majority, he said. And like he did Friday, he wouldn’t take the time to stump for or support Trump, instead ignoring him altogether.
