Paul Ryan says he would not back Donald Trump, if ex-president is GOP's 2024 nominee
WASHINGTON – Former U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan is doubling down on his belief that former President Donald Trump is the wrong choice for Republicans in 2024, saying he would not support Trump if he becomes the Republican nominee for president.
“There are too many people like me in the Republican Party who would not support him if he were the nominee, and that is why I don’t think he’ll be the nominee,” Ryan told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an interview. “Because everyone knows we’ll lose the election if we nominate this guy again.”
The Janesville Republican has been increasingly outspoken in his opposition to Trump in recent months, and his comments Thursday came as a number of prominent Republicans consider 2024 challenges to the former president, who remains the sole Republican to declare his candidacy for president.
But Ryan’s comments also land at a time when the former speaker has emerged from several years away from government — he retired from Congress in 2018 — to present a fresh vision for Republicans that focuses on fiscal reform. In the interview, he weighed in on the race for president in 2024, the current debate over the debt ceiling and the future of the Republican Party.
“Our politics have been so unserious lately that I believe that we need to get back to debating ideas and policies that rise to the moment,” said Ryan, who was elected to serve Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District in 1998.
“The Republican Party is going through a moment where it has to redefine itself,” he added later. “And the question is whether it's going to redefine itself around a personality or around a set of principles and ideas.”
Those principles and ideas, Ryan suggested, should deal mainly with establishing a social contract and safety net through reforms to Social Security and Medicare that he says will help avoid a debt crisis.
Ryan’s new book with the Washington think tank the American Enterprise Institute, "American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Nation's Finances,” attempts to address entitlement program reform in part through restructuring how Social Security is paid and looking into foreign retirement programs. It considers Australia’s retirement program, which combines a means-tested benefit with a requirement that full-time private-sector workers save for their own retirement.
Entitlement reform is nothing new for Ryan. He pushed for massive reforms to Social Security during his time in the House and as speaker but was largely unable to push through substantial changes to either Social Security or Medicare, which he has warned could become insolvent. Some Republicans, including Trump, have warned against changing the programs.
Still, Ryan agreed with Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s decision not to include entitlement reforms in ongoing debt ceiling negotiations on Capitol Hill, saying changes to programs like Social Security and Medicare need “longer, sustained conversation.”
He said the negotiations — Republicans are demanding spending cuts in exchange for voting to raise the borrowing limit — are “putting much needed attention on our fiscal problems” but noted brinkmanship “only goes so far.”
“I don’t really see this as the end-all-be-all,” Ryan said of the negotiations, adding that he does not think the U.S. will default on its payments. “It’s going to be a moment that’s going to come, it’s going to educate the public that we have a fiscal problem — that’s good. Hopefully some good fiscal policy will result from this moment, but the real heavy work will remain getting ahead of our debt crisis.”
Friction sparked by poor results in November election
Ryan attributed recent Republican infighting, including the drawn-out debate over McCarthy’s speaker bid last month, to friction within the party sparked by poor results in the November midterms. Republicans gained a narrow majority in the House but failed to capture the Senate in a year that should have been favorable to Republicans.
He placed blame for the midterms on Trump, noting a number of Trump backed candidates lost in 2022. And he again said the Republican Party should not base itself on “a cult of personality around Donald Trump.”
“We can have a prosperous country and a debt-free future. We can reinvent upward mobility and reinvent the American idea for the 21st century if we get the right policies in place,” Ryan told the Journal Sentinel. “And I don't think we'll accomplish that if we stick with a personality based populism that has proven now for three election cycles to lose us elections.”
When asked how Republicans will move past Trump, Ryan responded: “I think people will move past him because we want to win. The evidence is inescapable that we just lose elections with Trump. And I think even diehard Trump supporters know this.”
And despite his reemergence onto the policy scene in Washington, Ryan emphasized that he does not have aspirations for national office.
“I’m enjoying what I’m doing right now,” he said. “I love my family life. … For me, this phase of life is exactly where I want to be.”
And he quipped: “Plus I’m pretty anti-Trump, so I don’t know if (I) could do so well anyway.”