Former U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said on a Sunday morning news program that he is a “never-again-Trumper” and that Donald Trump is “unelectable.”
Ryan, a Republican who represented Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District for 20 years, was speaker of the House from 2015 to 2019. He told correspondent Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” in the wake of Trump’s announced run that Republicans would lose if they backed Trump for president in 2024.
“We get past Trump, we start winning elections. We stick with Trump, we keep losing elections. That’s just how I see it,” Ryan said.
Ryan said he was not a “Never Trumper,” as he worked with Trump as speaker on tax reform and other issues. But he believes Trump would lose the general election for presidency in 2024.
“I am a never-again-Trumper. Why? Because I want to win. And we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20, and now in 2022,” Ryan said.
Ryan said he thinks that Republican voters will “move on” and that Trump will not win the GOP nomination for president in 2024.
“I think we have a great stable of good, capable conservatives who are more than capable of winning this primary for the presidency and winning the (general) election, and I think Republican voters know that,” Ryan said.
He pointed to recent midterm losses of Trump-backed candidates in Arizona, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire and said Republicans could have won if “we had a typical and traditional conservative Republican, not a Trump Republican.”
Ryan, who said he is “definitely” not running for president in 2024, was interviewed by Karl as he promotes his new book, “American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Nation’s Finances.”
Ryan is part of a slate of Wisconsin Republicans who have come out in opposition to Trump in the wake of the Nov. 8 mid-term elections in which Republicans performed below expectations by failing to gain control of the U.S. Senate and winning back the House by only a thin margin. In an interview with WISN-TV, Ryan called Trump “kind of a drag on our ticket” and said he “gives us problems politically.”
Paul Ryan is nothing but a swamp rat, Trump will win !
Paul Ryan is a Rino. He thinks He’s something special but he’s far from it..
If Paul Ryan had done his best to help Trump with his agenda, we wouldn’t be in this mess today. He should’ve recognized that Donald Trump was not a career politician, who did not know how to ignore the criticism and antics of the opposition. I know that there were people who voted for him the first time but not in 2020 because they didn’t like the tweets. Well I sure would much rather have those tweets than Joe Biden. Also, we saw in 2020 how the Democrats took advantage of the Covid problem and came up with all kinds of games to cheat. If you saw what happened here in Florida after Ron DeSantis cleaned up the election part, they were no more shenanigans going on in Florida.
Never again Ryan!