– Ryan and House Republicans have favored overhauling Social Security and Medicare; Trump says those systems should not be touched. The things Trump has said and done, both the policy reversals and the insults, just in the last week, I can’t see how one meeting is going to change that.
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“A number of us are concerned about the lack of policy positions that he (Trump) has presented”. There is no two ways about that.
Iowa Republican leaders say they expect to capitalize on new voters brought into the process by Donald Trump, the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, and as a result, they will follow their success in the 2014 election with another strong performance this fall.
Meanwhile back in the Mansfield Room of the Senate, Republican senators sat down for their weekly conference and were forced to “welcome” back one of their least favorite colleagues, Ted Cruz, a week after the Texas senator abandoned the presidential campaign trail.
After declaring he did not need conservative voters to win, Trump and his surrogates made a decision to wage war on Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House of Representatives.
“We talked about what it takes to unify, where our differences were and how we can bridge these gaps going forward”, Ryan said, praising Trump’s “unparalleled” accomplishment in getting more votes already than any Republican presidential candidate in history – 10.9 million even before California and New Jersey vote in June.
They issued a statement describing their meeting as a “very positive step toward unification” that recognized “many important areas of common ground” as well as areas where they disagree.
The magazine said that Ryan is unlikely to embrace Trump after the first meeting.
But, he said, it will also be a tricky balance because many Trump supporters lauded his claims of being self-funded and not beholden to large donors.
Despite several Republicans acknowledging deep fissures within the party about a standardbearer whose policies often stray from conservative orthodoxy, Trump emerged from the meetings sounding optimistic about a rapprochement.
The 2012 vice-presidential nominee and running mate of Mitt Romney is widely touted as a likely future presidential contender.
While Trump’s team is prepared to shrug off much of the party’s establishment, that does not include the Republican National Committee.
Donald Trump was all smiles as he tried to mend fences and unify the Republican party.
The key to the whole day, however, was the joint statement that Ryan and Trump released in the wake of the gathering. Cruz took 71 percent of the vote, with Kasich and Trump a distant second and third at 16 percent and 14 percent, respectively. They will be forced to declare, in effect: “I don’t believe in anything he’s saying, but I support him because he’s the nominee of the party”.
File photo U.S. Congressman Chris Stewart addresses issues surrounding Bundy and the Constitution during a town hall in Cedar City.
And to top off Trump’s week, here is this story: “A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what NY reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, “80s and “90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with ‘John Miller” or ‘John Barron” – public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself – who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides”.
The greatest galvanizing force for the right is the desire to stop Hillary Clinton from winning the White House.
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Count Mell Flynn, president of the Hollywood Congress of Republicans, as a hopeful attendee. In a sharply worded floor speech Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid, D-Nevada, said McConnell and other Republicans were responsible for the rise of Trump due to their refusal to compromise with President Obama and Democrats. Trump said on the TODAY Show that the voice “doesn’t sound like me” and that the recording is a “scam”.
