JANESVILLE, Wis. — Kirk Henry got in line early to see Donald Trump at the Holiday Inn Express convention center right off Interstate 94 Tuesday. “He’s just a man that does what he says he’s gonna do,” Henry, a 26-year-old IT worker, said of Trump. “I feel in my heart that he’s going to do exactly what he says, and that’s what we need.”
Janesville, of course, is the home of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who has in recent days done his best to take shots at Trump without actually taking shots at Trump. Ryan and Trump have assumed positions at opposite ends of the Republican spectrum, so it wasn’t clear what Henry would say when I asked whether he supports his congressman.
“Oh yeah,” Henry told me. “Hundred percent. How could you not, if you’re from Janesville? There are so many people that support Paul Ryan, even Democrats. They love the man.”
So how does Henry reconcile liking both Trump and Ryan? The answer would not necessarily please the speaker: “Ryan will be for Trump if he wins the nomination,” Henry said with a smile.
Trump’s choice of a location to kick off his week in Wisconsin was an act of aggression. Right after Ryan gave a much-discussed speech on Capitol Hill urging leaders to hold themselves to “the highest standards of integrity and decency,” and “instead of playing to your anxieties, we can appeal to your aspirations” — veiled references to the Republican presidential front-runner — Trump announced that his first Wisconsin stop would be Janesville.
Ryan saw the challenge immediately, but, loath to get into a public fight with Trump, said nothing. But Ryan’s allies were not so constrained. “My friend @SpeakerRyan has too much class to say it, but @realDonaldTrump rally in #Janesville WI is a punk, insulting move,” tweeted Republican strategist Ron Christie. Trump’s rally, Christie tweeted later, was a “brushback pitch” aimed at Ryan.
The odd thing was, when the time came for Trump to actually speak in Janesville, he had almost nothing to say about Paul Ryan. While Trump dumped all over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who had just endorsed Ted Cruz in the GOP race, 26 minutes of the speech went by before Trump said anything about Ryan. And then, Trump was fishing for audience reaction more than saying anything about the House speaker.
“How do you like Paul Ryan?” Trump asked.
The answer was mostly boos. The boos didn’t fill the room — there were some Kirk Henrys there — but the reaction wasn’t positive.
“Wow,” Trump said. “I was told to be nice to Paul Ryan.”
More boos.
“He’s the speaker, he’s a nice guy, he called me the other day, he was very nice,” Trump said. “But I’m very surprised at this statement. Wow. Are you all Republicans?”
“Yes!”
“Are you mostly conservatives?”
“Yes.”
Trump undoubtedly filed that away for future Wisconsin speeches. And then he moved on to other things. A lot of other things. Much of the news of the day was that Trump stood behind campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was charged Tuesday morning with battery for a March 8 incident in which he allegedly grabbed then-Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields’ arm. But Trump didn’t just make a simple statement of standing behind Lewandowski. He went into the case at length, describing events of that night and doing a dramatic reading of Field’s first account of the affair. It was almost reminiscent of Trump’s extended mockery of Ben Carson’s childhood knife incident back in Iowa, except that Fields isn’t running for president.
“Did anybody see the tape?” Trump asked the audience, referring to new surveillance video released by police. They had.
“What did you think?”
“Nothing!” several people in the audience answered.
Trump asked for reaction repeatedly. “I re-ran it and re-ran it on a wide screen,” one woman said as Trump listened, “and there was nothing.”
“Yeah,” Trump said. “It’s horrible. It’s horrible. Honestly, it’s horrible.”
“But I can’t destroy a man,” Trump continued, referring to Lewandowski. “He’s got a beautiful wife and children, and I’m not going to destroy a man for that.”
Between defending Lewandowski and sounding out reaction to Ryan and slamming Walker, plus a few dozen other things, Trump didn’t leave himself much time to talk about Ted Cruz, who is, after all, his main opponent here in Wisconsin. When Trump did get around to Cruz, his critique focused less on the “Lyin’ Ted” of recent days than on the 2013 partial government shutdown.
“You know, Cruz likes to pretend he’s an outsider, and in the meantime he gets all this establishment support — including your governor,” Trump said. “Believe me, believe me, they’re all establishment. And frankly in a way, it’s worse, because Cruz is establishment and yet he’s got no relationship with the establishment. He goes and he stands on the floor of the Senate for a day and a half and he filibusters …. To stand there and to rant and rave for two days and to show people you can filibuster — and in the meantime, nothing was accomplished. Cruz has not accomplished one thing. So he’s an insider, but it’s almost like the man on the street because he can’t get anything done … He’s sort of got the worst of all elements. He’s an insider, totally, but he can get nothing done.”
Look for more of that in the coming week. And give Trump credit — he managed to hit Cruz for being a Washington insider and do it in words that could easily have come from Mitch McConnell in a private moment.
A number of people expected serious protests at the rally. After all, Janesville is just down the road from Madison, center of the 2011 protests against Walker’s Act 10 that essentially broke the back of public-sector unions in Wisconsin. It’s also just up the road from Chicago, site of the March 11 rally Trump would have held had it not been overrun by protesters. And here in Janesville, a group of demonstrators took over the Holiday Inn Express the night before Trump’s rally. “Protests fill lobby of Janesville Holiday Inn where Trump is to appear Tuesday. Expect a huge protest tomorrow,” tweeted the Nation’s John Nichols, who is based in Wisconsin.
But it didn’t happen. Yes, there were maybe 100 protesters outside the event, chanting and holding signs. And yes, there were a few confrontations with Trump supporters who didn’t get into the full-house rally. (The venue held perhaps 1,000 people, and many were turned away.) But a huge, Chicago- or Madison-style protest? No.
Trump told the crowd he will be in Wisconsin all week. There’s really nowhere else to be right now. If Trump wins next Tuesday, he will deliver a devastating blow to the #NeverTrump movement, and some of his opponents will undoubtedly give up in discouragement. But if Cruz wins, there will be new life in the effort to stop a newly-vulnerable Trump; the movement against him will gain momentum and hope — and delegates, too. There have been a lot of key moments in this race in which Trump could have been stopped, or slowed significantly. Time after time, that didn’t happen, and his opponents don’t have very many chances left. Wisconsin is a big one.
