‘Drag on Our Ticket’: Ex-Rep. Paul Ryan Disses Trump After Midterm ‘Red Wave’ Fails to Materialize
© AP Photo / Evan Vucci
Subscribe
Former US House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) blamed former US President Donald Trump for Republicans’ lackluster performance in the midterm elections earlier this week.
"I think we're going to have to do a lot of soul searching and head scratching, looking through and parsing the numbers as to why we didn't perform as well as we would have liked to," Ryan told local news outlet WISN on Thursday, adding that US Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) “got reelected, I'm very happy to see that. It was a mixed blessing night, but we should have done better than we did."
"I think Trump's kind of a drag on our ticket,” Ryan explained. “I think Donald Trump gives us problems, politically. We lost the House, the Senate and the White House in two years when Trump was on the ballot, or in office. I think we just have some Trump hangover. I think he's a drag on our office, on our races."
In the primary races for the GOP nomination for various offices around the country, Trump became a kind of “kingmaker,” with many of the nominations going to candidates he had endorsed - or at least not going to candidates he had denounced. However, in the general election on Tuesday, many of those candidates failed to outperform their Democratic rivals.
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan to @WISN_Caroline on midterm results and Trump: "I think Donald Trump gives us problems politically ... I think we just have some Trump hangover. I think he's a drag on our offices and our races." pic.twitter.com/pbxpubm2WP
— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) November 10, 2022
In Pennsylvania, Dr. Mehmet Oz lost his US Senate race and Doug Mastriano lost his bid for governor; in New Hampshire, Don Bolduc failed to unseat US Sen. Maggie Hassan; and in several races yet to be called on Thursday, Trump-backed candidates are behind in the vote counts. Those include Kari Lake in the Arizona governor’s race and Blake Masters in the race for one of the US Senate seats from that state. In addition, Herschel Walker and US Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) are headed for a special election next month after the vote in their race was too close to call.
When asked about how he thought things would go if Trump ran in 2024, as he’s widely expected to soon announce, Ryan predicted he would be unlikely to clinch the Republican Party nomination.
"We want to win. We want to win the White House and we know with Trump we're so much more likely to lose,” Ryan said. “Just look at the difference between votes, between Trump candidates and non-Trump aligned candidates."
"It's really clear to me and the evidence is pretty stark that if we have a nominee not named Trump, we're so much more likely to win the White House than if our candidate's named Trump," he added.
"We have to offer the country a better way forward. I think we have to offer the country solutions," Ryan continued. "We have to offer the country a really clear and compelling choice as to how our party is ripe and ready to solve big problems confronting the country and that we're putting leaders forward that people can vote for that they want to vote for."
Ryan served in the House for 20 years, from 1999 until 2019, spending his final four years in office as speaker of the House, with two of those years under Trump’s presidency. Their relationship was tumultuous and based on a belief in the necessity of party unity, although Ryan refused to endorse Trump’s 2016 election campaign and has repeatedly denounced Trump as a “curse” to the GOP.
NY Post Denounces ‘Toxic Trump’
That sentiment was shared on Thursday by the New York Post, a conservative outlet based in Trump’s hometown of New York City and owned by conservative Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
“Trumpty Dumpty,” the paper’s cover said, showing Trump perched precariously on a brick wall like the egg-shaped character in the English nursery rhyme.
Today's cover: Here’s how Donald Trump sabotaged the Republican midterms https://t.co/YUtDosSGfp pic.twitter.com/vpI94nKuBh
— New York Post (@nypost) November 10, 2022
“Don (who couldn’t build a wall) had a great fall - can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?” the paper’s cover page continues.
The Post has taken a stand against Trump since late 2020, when he rejected the results of the November 2020 elections, claiming Joe Biden had won via fraud. “Stop the insanity,” the paper’s editorial board pleaded one week before the insurrection by Trump’s supporters at the US Capitol.
“After three straight national tallies in which either he or his party or both were hammered by the national electorate, it’s time for even his stans to accept the truth: Toxic Trump is the political equivalent of a can of Raid,” the editorial reads.
“What Tuesday night’s results suggest is that Trump is perhaps the most profound vote repellent in modern American history,” it continues. “The surest way to lose in these midterms was to be a politician endorsed by Trump. This is not hyperbole.”
The final vote count for all the hundreds of election races in the US is not yet completed, but for those that remain to be called, a decisive shift in power in either the US House or US Senate seems nigh-impossible. In governor’s races, the Republicans also failed to make significant gains, but held onto many key states, including Florida, Texas, and Georgia.
When asked on Election Day about the potential outcomes, the former president told News Nation: "Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. If they lose, I should not be blamed at all."
