From the Thursday edition of the Morning Jolt:
Today’s Best-Case Summit Scenario: Trump Calls the Speaker ‘Tryin’ Ryan’Today’s BestCase Summit Scenario: Trump Calls the Speaker ‘Tryin’ Ryan’
Man, the Donald Trump–Paul Ryan conference today is the most wildly hyped meeting of leaders since the Yalta Summit. The cable networks are running countdown clocks until the start of the meeting.
Daniel Henninger points out that despite the yuge differences between the two men, there is room for common ground there:
The current narrative holds that the Ryan agenda and the Trump candidacy are irreconcilable, especially on immigration and trade. At bottom, though, I think both men want the same thing.
Donald Trump has the better way of putting it: Make America Great Again. Paul Ryan’s version, the one that runs back to Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, is: Restore economic growth.
Donald Trump and Paul Ryan should use Thursday’s meeting as the start of a conversation on restoring economic growth. Both men understand that Barack Obama’s seven years of zero to 2% growth is killing the American public.
Reversing that Obama economic legacy is essentially the only thing Paul Ryan thinks about. It is the reality that has made Donald Trump the party’s presumptive nominee.
The differences on trade and immigration matter. But even here both men recognize that horrible growth has made productive thought on either subject virtually impossible. And both know that if growth doesn’t get better, whoever wins in November will be a one-term president.
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic Party’s two leading figures, have given up on growth and now propose to anesthetize the American people to the Obama reality with the narcotic of “free” handouts.
Yup, the Trump and Ryan assessments of the state of the country overlap quite a bit. Think back to how Ryan greeted Obama’s most recent State of the Union address:
“I thought it was a fairly typical speech for the president,” Ryan said. “Apparently ISIS is a bunch of guys riding around in trucks and a picture of a good foreign policy is Syria. I think he glossed over the economy. I think he glossed over our foreign-policy failures.” Later he said, “That’s the kind of speech he gives these days, and I think it really is divorced from reality.”
He said Obama’s arguments defending his record — and dismissing as “political hot air” accusations that the nation is in economic and military decline — didn’t square with the realities many Americans see in their own lives. “What I don’t think you got out of that speech is, people are really hurting,” he said.
Ryan seems to grasp the danger of remaining in quasi-open rhetorical warfare with his party’s nominee all the way through to November. It’s not the primary challenge – Ryan is barely holding on to his 64-point lead— or the criticism from Sarah Palin; it’s that continual refusal to endorse Trump means that every conversation with the media for the rest of the year will include some variation of “here’s what’s wrong with Trump, and here’s why I can’t support him.”
We all know how warmly Trump welcomes criticism; every time the House speaker reaffirms his decision to not support the likely nominee, Trump will lash out at Ryan. And the more the two men are in a war of words with each other, the less they’re focusing the public’s attention on what they actually want to do to help the country. That’s only good for Nancy Pelosi and Congressional Democrats.
Trump probably grasps this too, but let’s face it; lashing out at perceived slights is deep within his DNA. It would do Trump some good to offer a non-generic bit of praise for Ryan – citing Ryan’s staunch opposition to the Iran deal, his fight against the administration’s visa-waiver program, or the House’s efforts to block President Obama’s executive-order amnesty.
But that would contradict Trump’s “everybody in Washington is selling you out, I’m the only one looking out for you” tone and argument.
Ryan could say some nice words about Trump’s bringing new people into the Republican party and how Trump has shown a spotlight on Americans who feel left behind by a rapidly changing economy and a culture that simply isn’t interested in working-class Americans anymore.
But 2016 has taught us not to bet on the best-case scenario.