The big news today is the meeting between presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Speaker [crscore]Paul Ryan[/crscore]. I don’t have much to add to this, except to say that it looks like Ryan really wants to find a way to make this relationship work out—and the person who wants it more usually loses.
Ryan seems to desperately want to find a way to support the Republican nominee without allowing the nominee’s rhetoric to tarnish Ryan’s brand of reform conservatism. Time will tell if this is a fool’s errand, but making this a win-win would require compromise and commitment.
He will have to accept Trump’s brand of scorched-earth populist politics—and Trump will have to soften some of the rough edges, in order for this to work. But here’s the problem: Literally nothing Trump has done leads us to believe he has the discipline or inclination to honor such a deal.
But Ryan may well stick his neck out in accommodating Trump’s toxic strain of Republicanism, only to see him go off the reservation and return to talking about Mexican rapists, banning all Muslims, and starting a trade war with China—whenever that best suits his needs.
It’s hard to criticize Ryan for hoping against hope that he can have his cake and eat it, too. One can understand why a Republican Speaker would want to bend over backwards to find a way to support the party’s nominee. So this makes a certain amount of sense. On the other hand, Ryan is entrusted as the leader of the loyal opposition within the GOP. And maybe he’s not really a wartime consigliere? A couple observers on Twitter have noted that Ryan is temperamentally biased toward comity—that he has always been a Boy Scout. This would make him ripe pickings for a man like Trump.
If Donald Trump turns out to be the demagogue that some fear he is, we might look back at this as a moment where Republican leaders completely capitulated. He won the nomination by persuading the voters, sure, but the last hurdle in the hostile takeover of the GOP involves getting the conservative movement’s intellectual leaders to acquiesce and bestow their blessings on his candidacy. He seems well on his way to meeting this goal.
Trump, if this scenario plays out (and Ryan still hasn’t endorsed him), will have gained power by co-opting—and misleading—elites into compromising their values. And the irony will be that Trump was always right: The establishment was weak and impotent—and not good at fighting for us.