I like Paul Ryan as a man of principle, but his principles are also a source of weakness – indeed of blindness. Ryan seems to have the impression that if he can just find the right words for something, people will like something they hate.
Ryan supported an immigration reform plan that would have doubled future immigration. Ryan doesn’t go around saying he wants to double immigration. He says we should “welcome” (who doesn’t want to welcome?) and that guest worker programs (where the workers face deportation if they try to change jobs) are needed to “spur economic growth.”
It just happens that expanding future immigration is spectacularly unpopular with both Republican voters and the general public. Ryan has to resort to euphemisms because his policy preferences are an albatross in both Republican primaries and the general election.
The strength of Trump in the primaries can’t be understood apart from the obtuseness and arrogance of Trump’s intraparty opponents. Trump’s opponents can’t be honest about important parts of their agenda because they know it is toxic. The result is that the “Kempian” faction resorts to weasel-talk that is incomprehensible to normal people (another favorite tactic is to use growth, opportunity and optimism as euphemisms for cutting taxes on high-earners – another broadly unpopular policy.)
I suspect that this is what people mean when they say that Trump – an egregious con artist – “tells it like it is.” On some issues – some of the time – Trump is clear. He wants to build a wall and deport all unauthorized immigrants. That isn’t exactly a popular position, but it is more popular than Ryan’s own extreme combination of upfront legalization and massively increased future immigration.
A less fanatical political leader would be looking for common ground between himself and that majority of the public that opposes increasing future immigration – and especially future low-skill immigration. That doesn’t mean capitulating to Trump. Trump is probably no more committed to his big, beautiful wall that he is to the tax cuts for the rich that he proposed earlier in the campaign. Trump is a symptom of the Republican Party’s illness. Part of that illness is a political elite that is caught up in the dynamic, optimistic, hopeful, sunny, smiling, growthy delusion that their obsessions are shared by most Americans and all that is missing are the magic words to make everyone understand.