House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said he and President Trump have talked more in one month than he and former President Barack Obama did throughout the entire Obama presidency.
“I spoke to him twice yesterday,” Ryan said Wednesday when conservative radio host Michael Medved asked how frequently he and Trump speak.
“I have spoken more with Donald Trump in the last month more than I have spoken with Barack Obama in the last eight years,” Ryan said.
Part of the reason for this could be that Ryan only became speaker Oct. 29, 2015 — when Obama had just more than a year left in office. But Ryan, before being elected speaker, was still a prominent congressional Republican, as chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Budget Committee.
Ryan also didn’t play up partnership with Obama in the summer of 2015 to get a trade promotion authority bill through Congress.
Their staffs worked closely together and there were “several direct phone calls the White House still won’t confirm between Obama and Ryan,” Politico reported when Ryan became speaker. “Those calls were in part vote counting, in part strategizing about how to avoid looking like they were working together — even though they were.”
