Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, one of the most prominent Republicans nationally to break with Donald Trump, says the hush-money criminal charges against the former president are politically motivated and are making him a stronger candidate.
Speaking with Milwaukee Magazine on Tuesday, Ryan reiterated his opposition to Trump in November. In the 30-minute interview less than two months before Milwaukee hosts the Republican National Convention, Ryan also criticized pro-Palestianian campus protesters as ignorant.
Ryan, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and the 2012 GOP nominee for vice president, is rare among prominent Republicans in declaring that he does not support Trump. He has said that because of Trump’s character, he will cast a write-in vote for another Republican in Trump’s rematch with President Joe Biden.
Ryan said it’s “fairly inconceivable” that the presumptive GOP presidential nominee would not be nominated at the convention in July, even if he is convicted in the Stormy Daniels hush money trial, which is nearing its end.
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
“I’m not a Trump supporter, but I think these New York prosecutors have overreached,” Ryan said. “Those politically motivated indictments have served to make him a victim and have rallied support around him from the Republican base. And even if he gets convicted in the trial he’s in right now, I don’t think it’s going to make a difference.
“So, what people try to fashion a narrative of – if he’s a convicted felon, that people are going to drop away their support – I don’t buy that. I don’t think they will because – and I’m not a Trump supporter – I think it’s a pretty ridiculous indictment.”
Ryan said it’s unlikely but not inconceivable that Democrats nominate someone other than Biden if the president “displays a very overt senior moment” before the Democratic National Convention in August in Chicago.
“Biden’s way below his peak” in polls, “so he has more room to improve,” Ryan said. “But if he’s not showing that he’s doing it, and then he has some real problem, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Democrats make a move to swap him out.”
On the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on college campuses, where students have protested Israel’s attacks on Gaza, Ryan said, “I think there’s a lot of historical ignorance there.”
“I believe you have professional agitators, paid protesters who probably know what they mean when they say ‘from the river to the sea.’ That means genocide and wiping a country off the map,” he said, referring to Israel. “I don’t think the 22-year-old from Oshkosh in an encampment in Madison knows that when he chants like this, he means, ‘wipe out a people in a country.’
“The amount of anti-Semitism that has been witnessed and evident in this country is really quite startling to me,” he continued. “And so I think we need to do a better job of educating our children as to the history of the world, the history of genocide, the history of the Holocaust and how the Zionist movement means the Jewish people should have a country in their homeland – and they do and they should.”
Look for the full interview with Paul Ryan in the July issue of Milwaukee Magazine.
