Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, in a speech Thursday evening at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California, plans to argue that the future of the GOP needs to be about more than former President Donald Trump.
“Once again, we conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads,” Mr. Ryan will say, according to excerpts shared in advance. “Here’s one reality we have to face: if the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality, or on second-rate imitations, then we’re not going anywhere.”
The party’s 2012 vice-presidential nominee has had a tense relationship with Mr. Trump. In 2019, the then-president said the former speaker was a failure whose “record of achievement was atrocious.”
Mr. Ryan is also expected to praise some of the former president’s accomplishments. He plans to say that voters are seeking GOP leaders willing to show “independence and mettle.”
This is the same mistake Liz Cheney made. As Dan McLaughlin has pointed out, while we anti-Trumpers have no surefire way of pushing the orange man out of the picture, ignoring him for a while is definitely a better bet than continuing to have establishment Republicans go after him. This deepens the polarization within the party and keeps the former president in the news.