Paul Ryan: Let’s Dump Trump and His Rural MAGA Base

Man, is this guy still bitter, or what?

He chairs a cable news network that has been friendly to Trump and yet out of the other side of his mouth, as an establishment Republican, it’s time to dump Trump and the entire MAGA base at the same time.

When he left Congress in 2018, Paul Ryan was not particularly popular among voters of his own party. He was as establishment as they come, a member of the Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney brand of republicanism. It was Donald Trump who cobbled together a winning coalition in 2016 after two consecutive losses led by moderate presidential candidates. Ryan was never really a grassroots kind of guy though he played the part well.

Ryan, in a recent interview, aired his grievances against Trump and any voters in the GOP still considering the former President as their choice for the nomination in 2024:

The New York Times Magazine has published a big old interview with Fox News board member and former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who is promoting a book called American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Country’s Finances (long title).

In the interview, Ryan—as is his custom—attempts to disavow Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson while simultaneously justifying his career-long complicity in their elevation. (Which is ongoing! He’s on the f—ing board of Fox News.) It’s all interesting stuff, if self-delusion is your thing—and whose thing isn’t it, really?—but this, we think, is Ryan’s best soundbite:

RYAN: Let’s stop carrying Donald Trump’s baggage. He’s not fit for the job, and if we nominate him again, we’re guaranteed a loss. We have basically two bases. We have the MAGA base and the suburban base. Those two give us presidencies. You have to have both. You will kill your suburban base, like we did in the Senate and the House in this last election, if we’re anywhere near Donald Trump. Let’s dump him so that we can win and actually advance our principles. I would not mess with Trump stuff.

As a congressman, Ryan represented Wisconsin’s 1st district which amounted to the city of Janesville and some surrounding areas. This is a rural part of the state that one would certainly consider to be the “MAGA country” that Ryan so desperately loathes. This would partly explain why he promptly left Wisconsin after his congressional career ended and moved to DC to be back in the corridors of power rather than the corridors of everyday Americans.

Ryan’s logic might be debatably valid, that Republicans lost the suburban vote in the ’22 midterms to the point that it tipped the scales in favor of Democrats. The question is whether that loss was a result of Trump or Trumpian candidates, or the effects of the Dobbs abortion ruling turning out Democrats in masse. However, Ryan says “you have to have both” the suburban and MAGA base to win, yet he wants to sacrifice one to win back the other one.

Maybe Ryan missed the Glenn Youngkin strategy in 2021 when he defeated the Democrat political machine in Virginia by uniting conservatives of all stripes to a historic win on the issue of education and parents’ rights. Instead, Ryan would rather disparage half the party rather than open his eyes to what his former constituents think of DC and the swamp.

Ryan has become akin to Liz Cheney and the same ilk that has a palatable disdain for their own constituents, especially the fact that their own constituents would prefer Donald Trump over them. Ryan would rather hang his hat on the “suburban base” but those voters need something to vote for and they care about cultural issues, especially the woke indoctrination of public schools. How would Ryan wade into those battles or would they be left unfought?

What’s unclear is if Ryan is angrier at Trump or Trump voters. It seems most likely to be the latter.