After weeks of hesitation, House speaker Paul Ryan announced Thursday that he would be voting for Donald Trump, citing the businessman’s ability to put the “issues that unite Republicans” into law.
“I feel confident [Donald Trump] would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives,” the Wisconsin congressman wrote in his hometown paper, the Janesville Gazette. “That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall.”
While acknowledging that he and Trump have their “differences,” the speaker said that in “reality” the two “have more common ground than disagreement.”
“Donald Trump and I have talked at great length about things such as the proper role of the executive and fundamental principles such as the protection of life,” Ryan wrote. “The list of potential Supreme Court nominees he released after our first meeting was very encouraging.”
He also acknowledged the comparative threat of “a Clinton White House,” which, he wrote, “represents all that our agenda aims to fix,” and echoed the need to “unite Republicans” through issues and ideas, a theme that he emphasized after meeting with Trump on May 12.
“I was very encouraged from what I heard from Donald Trump. I do believe that we are now planting the seeds to get ourselves unified, to bridge the policy differences,” Ryan said after their May meeting.
At the time, the speaker called the get-together “encouraging” and “pleasant,” but hesitated to endorse Trump. In his Thursday op-ed, Ryan explained the delay, writing that he could not endorse Trump “before discussing policies and basic principles” with him.
When confronted last week with inflammatory statements that Trump had made in the past, Ryan told THE WEEKLY STANDARD that he did not want to “get into” it. The speaker also denied a forthcoming endorsement last week, telling reporters that he had not “made a decision,” but that his staff and Trump’s are in communication “virtually every day.”
