“It’s impossible to understand what the strategy is”.
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The tension between the Republican heavyweights complicates Trump’s push to compete in Wisconsin, a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984. He also endorsed Senators John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, whom he called a “rising star”.
“None of these things are ever blank checks”, Ryan said earlier in the week. “She’s really pretty close to unhinged, and you’ve seen, you’ve seen it a couple times”.
“We will have disagreements”, Trump said.
Trump told the Post that Ryan had sought his endorsement in his Wisconsin primary, but that he was still “giving it very serious consideration”.
Exit quotation from Ryan, when asked this morning what the latest was on Trump endorsing him or not: “Heck if I know”. But Walker and Ryan are popular with the party base; both have favorability ratings in the 80s with GOP voters in the state.
Wisconsin “has a real Republican Party”, said University of Wisconsin political scientist Byron Shafer. “Or when another news organization gets banned for reporting what he says”.
Trump’s general election campaign has been defined by his constant attacks on fellow Republicans – a habit that has baffled party leaders, who have begged him to stay focused on his Democratic rival. “I certainly don’t trust Hillary, ” Coffman says.
King is also chairman of Ryan’s congressional campaign.
Ryan, who has criticized aspects of Trump’s campaign, replied that his endorsement of the NY businessman is not a blank check, and “if I see and hear things that I think are wrong, I’m not going to sit by and say nothing”. “I take it seriously”, she said.
After a week of back and forth grandstanding and brinksmanship, Donald Trump is expected to finally endorse House Speaker Paul Ryan in his reelection bid.
It’s not clear that Ryan is keen to receive Trump’s endorsement. “We need a Republican president and a Republican Congress and then we’ll make the changes that America needs”.
“In one way, she’s a monster”, he said in Wisconsin.
“If Donald Trump was a teenager he definitely would be the kid who turns the Nintendo off the second he starts losing at Mario Kart”. If I endorse him, I’ll get credit for being a team player at a moment when the party is struggling to unify and I’ll get to say, implausibly or not, that it was my endorsement that contributed to Ryan’s enormous win after it happens.
“I think it will all blow over. It’s just politics”, said Van Mobley, an early Trump backer in the state, a Trump delegate in Cleveland, and the Thiensville village president.
Ryan called that a “dark, grim, indefensible” idea.
But Coffman met recently with Libertarian vice presidential candidate William Weld, and his spokeswoman said Coffman has not decided which presidential candidate to support. “Trump’s divisive rhetoric to the Hispanic community at large has the potential to be devastating for years to come”. “I am not going to try to psychoanalyze this stuff”, Ryan told Jay Weber of WISN as part of a lengthy slate of local radio interviews Ryan was doing Thursday and Friday in advance of next Tuesday’s primary elections.
The speaker also defended his endorsement of Ryan to critics of Trump.
“We have to make them”, Trump said.
The remarks about Trump’s supporters came during a question-and-answer part of the program that was led by journalists involved in this weekend’s conference. At the time of the Trump event in Green Bay, Walker will be at a spaghetti dinner in the small northern Wisconsin town of Grand View.
While Clinton’s visit has not been confirmed, a protest to Trump’s is already in the works.
Talk that the billionaire businessman’s campaign might be imploding has increased in recent days, with Trump slipping in the polls after a controversial feud with the parents of an American Muslim soldier who died in Iraq.
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Trump’s approach to national security came under fire Friday as well, with former CIA Director Michael Morell contending the Republican nominee would make “a poor, even unsafe commander in chief”.
