House speaker Paul Ryan said Donald Trump is “not my kind of conservative” Monday, as he tried to explain the ideology of the presumptive GOP nominee for president.
The Hill reports Ryan’s comments from a morning meeting in Cleveland hosted by The Wall Street Journal:
“He’s not my kind of conservative, but I come from a different part and wing of the party,” the Wisconsin Republican said at a Wall Street Journal lunch in downtown Cleveland just as the Republican National Convention kicked off. “I think he is a conservative,” Ryan said of the presumptive GOP nominee and Manhattan billionaire businessman. “There are different kinds of conservatives, that’s for darn sure.” … “I think he is a conservative because of his experiences, but is he what we refer to as a movement conservative? … No, because he didn’t come up that way,” Ryan told about 25 reporters at during an invitation-only lunch at the Calfee Building in downtown Cleveland. “I know a lot of business leaders who are conservatives, who arrive at their conservative through their own path in life — not through studying the classics of conservatism.”
Ryan has come around on Trump in recent weeks, framing the election as a “binary choice” with one unacceptable option.
“It is either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton—you don’t get a third option. It’s one or the other and I know where I want to go,” he said during a CNN town hall last week.
