The grassroots voters that fueled the extraordinary rise of House Speaker Paul Ryan spurned their erstwhile conservative hero for a new champion, President Trump, marking a generational shift in ownership and attitude of the Republican Party.
A change in the philosophical predilections of the GOP has been blamed for this slow-rolling divorce, made official with Ryan’s announcement that he would step down as speaker and retire from Congress at year’s end after more than two decades in Washington. But irreconcilable ideological differences had little to do with it.
The Republican base in the twilight of the Reagan era was hungering for a street fighter who would play by WWE rules — in other words, no rules. Enter Trump, the brash New York billionaire who would say and do almost anything in pursuit of victory.
Ryan, an affable Midwesterner from Southeast Wisconsin, played by Queensbury Rules. Tough and determined, he nevertheless represents a fading party that values a conservatism of ideas, personal character, and reverence for institutions. The speaker honored the limits of constitutional governance, no longer a virtue in a party that defines success primarily by bringing Democrats to their knees.
“It’s all personality and style,” said veteran Republican strategist Jeff Roe, who guided another upstart presidential campaign in 2016, that of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who finished second to Trump in the GOP primaries. “When you talk about Republicans and what they want — they want someone who will strap it on and fight and not care what everybody says.”
Ryan, 48, is a movement conservative. He spent his professional political life trying to complete President Ronald Reagan’s mission to build an America unchallenged on the world stage, governed by a smaller, less intrusive bureaucracy; and juiced by a thriving free market economy. Like Reagan, Ryan was a happy warrior.
He served spoonfuls of aspirational honey to go along with the tough policy medicine he prescribed to achieve conservative nirvana, administering the tonic to all communities of an increasingly culturally and racially diverse superpower. The Republican grassroots couldn’t get enough. They propelled Ryan from backbencher congressman in 1999, to the GOP nominee for vice president in 2012, to House speaker three years later.
In hindsight, it’s possible that Ryan’s appeal among base voters was less about his signature proposals to overhaul Medicare and Social Security and end cherished spending programs, than a willingness to challenge Republican leaders on Capitol Hill and aggressively attack the entrenched two-party system by taking on so-called “third rail” issues.
To wit, as Ryan’s star was rising, seeds of the eventual Trump takeover were manifesting.
In 2012, a series of outsider and anti-establishment candidates threatened to derail Mitt Romney in the Republican presidential primary. Four years later, Trump felled the establishment. He quickly won over Republican voters in a crowded, talented field with a combative style that mercilessly crucified all perceived enemies — opposition candidates, the media, even Republican insiders publicly supporting his campaign.
“It’s an attitudinal difference,” Brian Lanza, a Republican operative who served on Trump’s campaign, said, explaining why the GOP base soured on Ryan and turned to the president. “President Trump is teaching the GOP how to fight the New York way, as a street brawler, and now that we’ve seen that it works, we want more of it.”
“One of the charms of Donald Trump: He’s not politically correct. His flaws are his assets,” added Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who was defeated by Trump in the 2016 primary but managed to cultivate a productive, though rocky, working relationship with the president since then.
Trump didn’t adopt traditional Republicanism whole hog, positioning himself as a populist and a nationalist. He diverged from party orthodoxy on international trade and some matters of foreign policy while rejecting the GOP’s support for overhauling entitlement programs after years of stubborn campaigning by Ryan to install it in the platform.
Yet Trump has so far governed mostly as a traditional Republican. He’s nominated conservative judges, signed a long-sought-after GOP tax reform bill (that also happened to fulfill a career ambition of Ryan’s,) and maintained U.S. alliances and military commitments abroad, much like any of his Republican opponents in 2016 would have had they won the White House.
Indeed, most of the friction between Trump and Ryan — and to the extent there’s still a Ryan wing of the GOP, it and the dominant Trump wing — have been tonal and stylistic.
Ryan has practiced an inclusive, civil brand of politics. That has periodically put him at odds with, and occasionally compelled him to speak out against, Trump. Even as president, Trump’s provocative rhetoric has spanned racially tinged attacks on certain groups, U.S. intelligence agencies, and the FBI, to name a few of his irksome targets.
The outgoing speaker has absorbed criticism from the Left, and the disappointment of Trump’s opponents on the Right, for not standing up to Trump more often, or forcefully. Both attacks suggest that there’s something Ryan could have done, that there’s a party waiting to follow him if he would only lead the opposition to the president.
In fact, the base is with Trump. Republican candidates running in primaries for this year’s midterms are competing with each other to prove who stands more ready to support the president. Party strategists who have watched the grassroots transition from Ryan to Trump say it’s the best way to prove that you’re not going to Washington to cooperate with the system, but rather, to fight it.
“The litmus test for being Republican these days isn’t about any given set of ideals or principles. It’s about loyalty to the man,” said Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Pa., a centrist dealmaker who is retiring after a dozen years in Congress.
Al Weaver contributed to this report
