Former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who led the Republican House majority during former President Trump’s first two years in office, believes Trump is an authoritarian narcissist whose driving principle is self-promotion.
Ryan defended former Republican Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for opposing Trump, claiming that many Republican members now regret not voting for impeachment charges and therefore missing their chance to remove Trump from the political arena.
CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER“Trump’s not a conservative, he’s an authoritarian narcissist. So I think they basically called him out for that,” Ryan said of Cheney and Kinzinger during a video conference interview with Teneo Political Risk Advisory Co-President Kevin Kajiwara.
Trump, according to Ryan, is “a populist authoritarian narcissist.”
Paul Ryan was put on the board at Fox News. It’s been said that the first directive he gave to the on-air talent was to not talk so much about Trump in a positive light. So, Ryan’s instincts told him to censor the First Amendment rights of the press and free speech to harm a political figure, Donald Trump. Who is the real authoritarian?
“Historically speaking, all of his tendencies are basically where narcissism takes him, which is whatever makes him popular, makes him feel good in any given moment,” he went on to say. “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.”
Ryan stated that Cheney and Kinzinger “stepped out of the flow” of many other Republicans following Trump’s lead and “called it out.”
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELHe supports fellow RINOs who sided with the communist Democrats and participated in an authoritarian congressional [un]select committee for the January 6 events, where they hid exculpatory evidence and lied daily to the American people about what happened that fateful day and especially about Trump’s role in it.
He claimed they “paid for it with careers,” but they made the correct decision.
“There has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re not going to cross so that when you’re brushing in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror, you like what you see. I think Adam and Liz are brushing their teeth, liking what they see,” he explained.
Many Republicans in Congress, according to Ryan, are likely regretting not standing up to Trump’s attempt to reverse the 2020 election and not voting to impeach or convict him on impeachment charges when they had the opportunity to end his political career.
“I think there are a lot of people in Congress, good friends of mine, who would take [their] vote back if they could, because I think a lot of these members of Congress — like on the second impeachment — they thought Trump was dead. They thought after Jan. 6 he wasn’t going to have a comeback, he was dead,” he added.
“So they figured, ‘I’m not going to take this heat, I’m going to vote against this impeachment because he’s gone, anyway.’ But what’s happened is he’s been resurrected,” Ryan said. “So I think there are a lot of people who already regret not getting him out of the way when they could have.”
He stated that “history will be kind” to Trump detractors such as Cheney and Kinzinger.
Ryan left Congress in 2018, less than two years into Trump’s first term in office. He remarked then that he wanted to spend more time with his family and not be a “weekend dad.”
I believe that had Ryan funded Trump’s border wall, the GOP would have kept the House in the 2018 midterm elections. Just before the 2016 election, Ryan said to Republican leaders on a conference call that he would never support a “President Trump,” and he never did.
At the time of his announced retirement, he mentioned Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act as a highlight of his time as Speaker.
