Paul Ryan has had enough of Donald Trump, and during a recent interview, he laid into the former president, calling him a threat to the United States who is not even conservative.
The former Speaker, who recently backed Nikki Haley for president, claimed that Republicans could do much better than Trump and said he believes he is the weakest candidate against Joe Biden.
Yahoo reports:
The former president is “not a conservative,” Ryan declared during a recent virtual interview hosted by CEO advisory firm Teneo that the Republican Accountability group unearthed and shared on X (née Twitter) on Wednesday.
Trump’s tendencies “are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, makes him feel good at any given moment,” Ryan said. “He doesn’t think in classical liberal-conservative terms. He thinks in an authoritarian way. And he’s been able to get a big chunk of the Republican base to follow him because he’s the culture warrior.”
This is not the first time that the former Speaker and once-upon-a-time VP pick slammed the former president. In 2022, Ryan announced that he supported “anybody not named Trump” for the GOP nomination, saying that he’s the candidate most likely to lose to Joe Biden in 2024.
“The only reason he stays where he is is because everybody’s afraid of him,” Ryan added in another interview. “They’re afraid of him going after them, hurting their own ambition. But as soon as you sort of get the herd mentality going, it’s unstoppable.”
“We know we’re so much more likely to lose with Trump because of the fact that he is not popular with suburban voters that we’re gonna want to win,” Ryan told Fox Business in October 2022. “We lost the House, the Senate, the White House in the space of two years. I don’t want to repeat that. I want to win.”
Recent polling showed that Trump has taken large lead of Joe Biden. The Hill noted earlier in the week, “Former President Trump is leading President Biden in seven swing states, dealing the latest blow to Biden’s reelection campaign just weeks ahead of the start of primary voting season, according to a new survey.
The poll, published Thursday from Morning Consult and Bloomberg News, found Biden is trailing the former president by an average of 5.28 points in the seven swing states surveyed — including North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and Pennsylvania.”
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