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Donald
Trump endorses Paul Ryan after previously refusing to back him
‘We
may disagree on a couple of things but mostly we agree,’ the
Republican candidate said of the House speaker in an attempt at party
unity
Ben Jacobs in
Washington
Saturday 6 August
2016 02.19 BST
Donald Trump finally
endorsed US House speaker Paul Ryan on Friday, reversing himself
after pointedly refusing to back the highest ranking elected
Republican in an interview earlier this week.
In a rally in Green
Bay, Wisconsin, on Friday night, Trump read his endorsement off a
sheet of paper, saying: “In our shared mission to make America
great again, I support and endorse our speaker of the House, Paul
Ryan.”
“We may disagree
on a couple of things but mostly we agree,” he added.
Ryan has pointedly
criticized Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim migration to the US,
and said that the Republican nominee’s attack on a federal judge
was “the textbook definition of a racist comment”. This week, he
also disagreed with Trump over the candidate’s running feud with
the family of a Muslim American army captain killed in the Iraq war.
An aide to Ryan told
the Guardian that the speaker “appreciates the gesture and is going
to continue to focus on earning the endorsement of the voters in
southern Wisconsin.”
The Trump campaign's
terrible week: polls and experts indicate bleak future
Read more
Trump said earlier
this week in an interview with the Washington Post: “I like Paul,
but these are horrible times for our country. We need very, very
strong leadership. And I’m just not quite there yet. I’m not
quite there yet.”
In May, after Trump
clinched the nomination, Ryan expressed similar ambivalence about the
man who won his party’s support, saying: “I’m just not ready to
do that at this point. I’m not there right now.” Ryan eventually
endorsed Trump in June, writing in an op-ed: “It’s no secret that
he and I have our differences. I won’t pretend otherwise.”
However, in refusing
to endorse Ryan, Trump was seen as thumbing his nose at Reince
Priebus, the chair of the Republican National Committee and a leader
who has gone out of his way to ensure that party elders treat Trump
as a legitimate nominee. Priebus, a fellow Wisconsinite and close
ally of Ryan, has fought hard to unite a party fractured by its
nominee.
Ryan is widely
expected to win his primary contest in a landslide this year, but his
opponent, businessman Paul Nehlen, has adopted elements of Trump’s
message and tone, and shares many of the same support from the
fringes of the Republican party. Nehlen gained national attention
Thursday by suggesting the deportation of all Muslims from the US.
On Friday, Trump
also read out endorsements of senators John McCain of Arizona and
Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire. “While I’m at it, I hold in the
highest esteem senator John McCain for his service to our country in
uniform and in public office and I fully support and endorse his
re-election,” Trump said.
“I also fully
support and endorse Seantor Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, a state I
truly love,” he added. “She is a rising star and will continue to
represent the great people of New Hampshire so very well for a very
long time.”
In his interview
with the Washington Post, Trump attacked McCain, a decorated war
hero, because he has “not done a good job for the vets”. He also
called Ayotte “weak” and claimed to be beating her in polls,
although the two are not competing and the senator has higher
favorable numbers than Trump.
Last year Trump cast
derision at McCain as well, calling the Vietnam veteran and 2008
nominee “not a war hero” because he was captured. Ayotte faces a
tough re-election bid in New Hampshire, a swing state, and has said
she will vote for Trump but withheld an explicit endorsement.
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For
Donald Trump, this was more than a terrible week. It was a turning
point
Richard Wolffe
It
would be tempting to say this was just another episode in the bizarre
life of the Republican presidential nominee. But it was far worse
Friday 5 August 2016
15.31 BST
What have you
accomplished this week? Whatever it is, you don’t come close to
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is
alienating his own party? That's practically American tradition
James Nevius
Read more
Trump has demolished
his campaign, his brand and his party. He has squandered his
vice-presidential pick and his convention, and several battleground
states along with them. He picked several fights he could not win,
and showed no sign of learning from his own failure.
It would be tempting
to say this was just another week in the bizarre life of the
Republican presidential nominee.
But it wasn’t.
This week was a decisive turning point in the 2016 election, and
there have been remarkably few of them in an campaign that is
supposedly volatile.
In fact, the
volatility and unpredictability of this election doesn’t come from
polls or votes, but from the character of a single man: Donald J
Trump. The real surprise of 2016 is how constant this contest has
been.
Trump led the
primary polls from the beginning and never lost his lead. He only
surprised the chattering classes by defying their certainty that he
would lose. That certainty was founded on nothing related to polling
data, but rather their sheer disgust and disbelief with Trump’s
politics.
Current Time 0:00
Having defied
expectations once, Trump is now supposed to be able to defy polling
gravity forever more. That would be a strange conclusion to draw from
the primaries, but here we are.
Echoing the Trump
campaign, the Fox News anchor Greta van Susteren distilled this
position on Thursday, as she quizzed the poll-obsessed Karl Rove. “I
see the rallies and they’re big, and I see the poll numbers, and
he’s slipping in the polls,” she said. “I’m not so sure how
accurate these polls are.”
Rove – the man who
challenged the Fox News election desk as it called the 2012 election
for Obama – was incredulous. “You’re assuming first of all, the
polls are not reliable – all of them – and second of all, that a
better test of this is the size of the crowds he gets at his rallies,
which are big and enthusiastic,” he explained. “But I would
remind you in the closing days in the 1984 presidential campaign,
Walter Mondale was drawing large and enthusiastic rallies as he went
on to narrowly win one state.”
To put it
delicately, this is a difficult moment in the education of Donald
Trump. For a candidate who leads every stump speech bragging about
his poll numbers, there is less and less material every day. Ergo the
polls – just like the media, Clinton and democracy itself – must
be crooked.
It would be nice to
call this a logical fallacy, but those are two words that should
never be placed within physical proximity of Donald J Trump.
“I see some great
polls,” he told a rally in Virginia on Tuesday. “I see one from
the Los Angeles Times, just came out, where we’re ahead by four or
five points. I see one from CNN where we’re down. I think these
polls, I don’t know. There’s something about these polls. There’s
something phony.”
That was the day
after he told voters there was an even bigger problem with this
confounding election. “I’m afraid the election’s going to be
rigged,” he told voters in Ohio. “I have to be honest.”
Those who live in
the reality-based world are having an easier time understanding
Trump’s challenges. The simpler explanation is that he is losing
because of his own performance and personality. As the saying goes,
campaigns are like fish: they rot from the head down. This one stinks
already and it’s only the start of August.
Barack Obama put it
more diplomatically at his pre-vacation press conference. “If Mr
Trump is up 10 or 15 points on election day and he ends up losing,
then, you know, maybe he can raise some questions,” Obama ventured.
“That doesn’t seem to be the case at the moment.”
No, it doesn’t. In
any campaign cycle, there are periods when the dynamic turns
decisively in one direction. While the dynamic can shift more than
once, as the cycle runs its course there are fewer and fewer
opportunities to do so.
George HW Bush
engineered one of those shifts after his 1988 convention, turning a
17-point deficit into an eight-point lead, backed up by devastating
TV ads. Bill Clinton enjoyed one of those shifts in 1992 when Ross
Perot initially dropped out of the race, and Clinton never really
lost his lead again.
In 2004, John Kerry
staged a decent convention and held a narrow lead, but was soon
destroyed by a better Republican convention and the swift-boat
attacks that followed. Four years later, Barack Obama didn’t bury
John McCain until the financial collapse that followed both
conventions.
How does the past
week of 2016 compare to those history-making moments in recent
presidential history? Pretty favorably.
Trump miserably
misjudged his dispute with the gold star parents of a fallen American
soldier, Humayun Khan, who was Muslim. He drove a wedge between
himself and the few Republican leaders who publicly tolerated his
nomination. And he seriously undermined his own brand of patriotic
nationalism, as well as his party’s reputation for strength on
national security.
The lasting impact
of Trump’s disastrous week came from its echoes of the Democratic
convention. Each round of dispute with the Khan family only served to
reinforce the criticism that he had sacrificed nothing. Each
bone-headed response underscored Hillary Clinton’s attack on his
temperament and qualifications to serve as commander-in-chief.
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In the middle of his
own circular firing squad, Trump decided to shoot at the one unifying
Republican who has politely ignored his insanity: House speaker Paul
Ryan. Trump’s support for Ryan’s primary opponent was – like
the construction of so many hideous Trump Towers – wholly
unnecessary.
Ryan’s response
was to send out a fundraising email assuming Trump had already blown
this election. “If we fail to protect our majority in Congress, we
could be handing President Hillary Clinton a blank check,” the
fundraiser said, echoing the congressional Republican party’s
abandonment of Bob Dole in the closing weeks of the 1996 election.
Of course, these
aren’t the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign. Trump could yet turn
around his national polling deficit of up to 14 points. He could flip
the polls in Florida (down four), Michigan (down nine), Pennsylvania
(down 13) and New Hampshire (down 15). He could turn Georgia and Utah
back into reliably Republican states again, instead of being
dead-heat states.
But Trump only has
one shot left to do that: the TV debates that start in another seven
weeks. At the same time, history suggests that post-convention
polling is remarkably stable stretching all the way into the final
days of an election.
It’s going to be a
long, hot summer for the orange one.
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