TRUMP NEVER HAD BIDEN’S HIGH POLL NUMBERS

                                         …Former House Speaker, Paul Ryan

 

Trump attacks more Republicans than he does Democrats

 

It is so sad that our former president is going after former and current Republican, more than he is going after the Democrats.  Even though Trump does say false things such as “The Democrats are destroying the country,” while the members of the Trump administration, and Trump himself, are the ones in the most legal trouble, due to their former mismanagement of U.S. governance.

The latest case in point is the former Republican House Speaker, Paul Ryan (R-WIS), who in a speech at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library said, without mentioning Trump’s name, he appealed to the GOP party members to: “not rely on the appeal of one personality.”  Later, Ryan did name Trump as the point in his speech.

As expected, Trump later went after the former Speaker saying: . “He has no clue as to what needs to be done for our country.  He was a weak and ineffective leader, and he spends all of his time fighting Republicans as opposed to the Democrats who are destroying our country.”  He also said that Ryan: “is a curse to the Republican Party.”

I find it interesting that Trump is accusing the former Speaker of doing exactly what Trump is doing in going after more Republicans than Democrats.

Trump also dismissed Ryan as a Republican-in-name-only (RINO) and said he does “nothing for our forward-surging Republican Party!”  “What forward -surging Republican party…?”

Ryan left politics after three years as Speaker, during which Trump ascended as the de facto leader of the GOP.  Ryan had attacked Trump the candidate, but later backed off when Trump became president. His criticisms became more cautious, and he often told reporters he had not seen Trump’s latest questionable, false or incendiary tweet.

“Once again, we conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads. And 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,” Ryan said..

But Ryan was short of denouncing Trump. Instead, he credited “the populism of President Trump in action, tethered to conservative principles for a robust economy in early 2020,” this was said just before the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.

Discussing the current struggles of the GOP, Ryan also noted that Trump had refused to accept the 2020 election results.

“Even worse, it was horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end,” the former speaker said.

He also seemed to swipe at his successor, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), when he said “voters won’t be impressed by the sight of yes-men and flatterers flocking to Mar-a-Lago.”

Ryan, who sits on the board of Fox Corp., which includes Fox News, he also “urged his party not to get caught up in every little cultural battle.”

“Sometimes these skirmishes are just creations of outrage peddlers, detached from reality and not worth anybody’s time,” he said.

It’s interesting that even though Ryan is on Fox's board, Fox News already dedicates considerable airtime to all of those culture wars.

A Ryan spokesman did not respond when asked if the former speaker has concerns about Fox’s coverage of politics.

Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential nominee on the GOP ticket with Mitt Romney, was once seen as a rising star in the party. He was young, polished, and a policy wonk who some Republicans believed would usher in the next generation of conservatives.

Instead, like other up-and-comers, he was sidelined by Trump’s swift takeover of the Republican Party and its base. Unlike others who left politics, and even some still in, like Romney, who is now a senator from Utah, who feel freer to say what they really think about their party’s new leader, while Ryan has kept a relatively low profile.

That has not spared him from Trump’s ire, though. Ryan did give interviews to Tim Alberta of Politico for a negative book about the GOP under Trump, where Ryan unleashed on the president. When the book came out in 2019, Trump counterpunched back at Ryan.

“He had the Majority & blew it away with his poor leadership and bad timing,” Trump tweeted. “They couldn’t get him out of Congress fast enough!”

In his speech, Ryan also criticized President Biden as a “nice guy” with too many liberal policies.

“In 2020, the country wanted a nice guy who would move to the center and depolarize our politics,” Ryan said. “Instead, we got a nice guy pursuing an agenda more leftist than any president in my lifetime.”

What Ryan has to say about President Biden is actually true, in that Biden is a nice guy with his liberal ideas.  But, the reality is that most Americans agree with the liberal ideas that Biden supports such as equal pay for women; a real U.S. infrastructure program; that the wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes; national paid maternity and sick leave; the rebuilding our electric grid; and dealing with climate change and more American built electric vehicles.

Just look at the way Biden took over the Coronavirus pandemic and what his poll results continue to be, compared to numbers that Trump never had in his four years as president.

Hopefully, more Republicans like Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney will surface over time.  But I’m not holding my breath.

Copyright G. Ater 2021