House Speaker Paul Ryan has begun telling confidants that he wants to end his standoff with Donald Trump according to Bloomberg. Just 3 weeks after "just not being ready" to endorse Trump, and 2 weeks after signalling "unity" having met with The Donald; it seems the speaker's decision, according to two people close to the lawmaker, was driven in part because he’s worried the split has sharpened divisions in the Republican Party.
Just 10 days ago we asked, What is Ryan up to?
He is pandering to the Trump-hating Beltway media and claiming the leadership of a Republican establishment routed and repudiated in the primaries, not only by that half of the party that voted for Trump, but also by that huge slice of the party that voted for Ted Cruz.
The hubris here astonishes. A Republican establishment that has been beaten as badly as Carthage in the Third Punic War is now making demands on Scipio Africanus and the victorious Romans.
This is difficult to absorb.
Someone should instruct Paul Ryan that losers do not make demands. They make requests. They make pleas.
What makes Ryan’s demands more astonishing is that he is the designated chairman of the Republican National Convention, a majority of whose delegates and whose nomination Trump is about to win.
Ryan is saying he is ambivalent over whether he will accept the verdict of the Cleveland convention — of which he is the chairman.
If Ryan holds to his refusal to accept the decision of the Republican majority in the primaries, he should be removed from that role. And if Ryan does not come out of today’s meeting with the Donald, endorsing him, the presumptive nominee should turn to Paul Ryan, and, in two words, tell him, “You’re fired!”
Trump cannot allow the establishment to claw back in the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill what he won on a political battlefield. He cannot allow a discredited establishment to dictate the issues he may run on.
That would be a betrayal of the troops who brought Trump victory after victory in the primaries.
Concluding that...
Paul Ryan, in declaring that he cannot now support Trump, and imposing conditions to earn his support, has crawled out on a long limb.
Trump cannot capitulate. He has to saw it off.
This is one Private Ryan we cannot save.
And now, with little surprise, Bloomberg reports Ryan is about to fold...
Ryan aides say nothing has been decided about a possible Trump endorsement. But Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, told a small group of Republican lawmakers Thursday that he expects Ryan to endorse the party’s nominee as early as this week, according to two people in the meeting.
If Ryan were to endorse Trump, the move would end a nearly unprecedented standoff between the House speaker and his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, and remove the biggest remaining obstacle to Trump’s efforts to unite Republicans around his campaign.
In fact, Manafort told the gathering of Republican lawmakers that Ryan’s endorsement would put more pressure on the party’s remaining Trump holdouts to fall in line.
It would also link the speaker more directly to Trump, marking a significant break for a man who ran on a presidential ticket in 2012 with Mitt Romney -- by far Trump’s loudest critic inside the party.
It’s not clear how Ryan, who said that he wasn’t interested in a "fake unification" of his party, would choreograph an endorsement after his initial public reluctance.
The establishment is shaking...
Dan Senor, a Republican strategist and friend of Ryan’s, said Tuesday he would be disappointed if Ryan comes out in favor of Trump.
"All Republican leaders should think twice about endorsing someone who is trafficking in racism, sexism and misogyny and is not a conservative," he said on Bloomberg Television’s "With All Due Respect."
By endorsing Trump, Ryan would deal a near-fatal blow to conservative efforts to draft a third-party candidate to run against Trump and Democratic Hillary Clinton.