Paul Ryan Says Even MAGA Diehards Believe Trump Can’t Win in 2024

For a good long time during the George W. Bush and Obama presidencies, Paul Ryan was considered one of the intellectual leaders and shining stars of the Republican Party. Ryan, Mitt Romney’s 2012 vice-presidential running mate, was a stalwart advocate of lower taxes, entitlement reform and hawkishness on the deficit. Then Donald Trump arrived and blew everything up. A now 53-year-old Wisconsinite, Ryan, who served as speaker of the House from 2015 to 2019 before retiring to family life, think tanks, academia and corporate boards, went from policy captain to anachronism, his affable Reaganite focus on supply-side economics out of place on a remade political stage of continual conflict-baiting and culture-war outrage. Recently, though, Ryan has re-entered public life, though only partly of his own choosing. His behind-the-scenes concerns about the direction of Fox News — he’s on the Fox Corp board of directors — were put on display as part of the Dominion defamation lawsuit against the company. He is also trying to prevent the Republican presidential nomination from again being won by Trump, with whom he had a tortured if politically fruitful relationship, and he is touting a new book, “American Renewal: A Conservative Plan to Strengthen the Social Contract and Save the Country’s Finances,” which he edited with Angela Rachidi. “I always look at the glass as half full,” Ryan says about our current political moment, “but one of our biggest challenges right now is our fundamentally unserious politics.”

I just read your old book “The Way Forward,” and in it you’re saying that the Republican Party needs to be more than just a party of opposition. That was in 2014. Do you have reason to believe the party of today is any closer to where you’d like it to be? No, you’re right, it isn’t the case. Politics is supposed to be about ideas, principles and policies, and it should be aspirational and optimistic. We’ve gone in the opposite direction. Politics has become more performance art than persuasion. My side of the aisle, the people who do well these days are the people who do culture-war politics. Culture-war politics can get you your vote coalition, but it requires that you play identity politics, and identity politics is immoral. It is by definition divisive. If you can divide an electorate so that you get 50-plus-1 percent, you can win an election, but the other 49 percent hate you, and it’s not how I think democracies will survive in the 21st century. It makes it harder for our politics to be unifying. But I think there are mechanisms to society that will get us back there.

Like what kind of mechanisms? I think we’re coming to a time of polarization fatigue, of problems mounting and not getting solved, and voters are going to eventually reward problem solvers. If you’re a Trump 2.0, a culture warrior, and get the passion of the base to win your party’s nomination — it’s thin gruel from a substance standpoint. I’d like to think that people can be a Reagan 2.0. An aspirational, inclusive and unifying figure who’s not afraid to take on policy challenges with serious solutions and work hard at persuading people. I hope that’s where it’s going. That is not where it is today.

Paul Ryan speaking at Dayton International Airport during the 2012 presidential campaign.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When we talk about politicians willing to emulate Trump, part of what we’re talking about is political expediency. Isn’t that kind of political expediency a version of what you and other now-anti-Trump Republicans were engaging in when his presidency allowed you to pursue your own policy goals? I know that when this kind of question has been raised with you in the past, you’ve pointed to the T.C.J.A., Supreme Court judges — Criminal justice reform, opioid, cancer, infrastructure bills, a lot of regulatory reform and obviously tax reform, something I worked on my whole career.

But Trump’s unassailability within the party is not unrelated to those achievements. So how do you untie that Gordian knot? We know now the results of this thesis: We lose. We lost the House because of Trump in ’18. We lost the White House in ’20 because of Trump. We lost the Senate because of Trump in ’20 and ’22. What we didn’t know then — we spent 2015 building an agenda that we would run on and take to the country. Then Trump won. I thought, the man’s just become president. He doesn’t know anything about government, he’s never been involved in it before, so let’s help him. Mitch McConnell and I spoke quite a bit in those early hours: We got to help this guy govern. As we learned what he was like, we decided we’re going to put these Jersey barriers on the road: The car is going to scrape the sides, but we’re going to get the country moving in the right direction. I put out this massive Gantt chart that my chief of staff designed with me with McConnell’s consent. I figured Trump is a construction guy, he’ll know how a Gantt chart works. I put together this chart: Here’s the agenda. I ran Congress for two years on that Gantt chart. Every time he did some crazy tweet or tried to get Congress to go off on some tangent, I’d always say, “No, remember we have this Gantt chart and this is what we’re supposed to be doing now.” So my belief at the time was: He won, he didn’t know he was going to win — Comey gave us this letter like four weeks out putting Hillary under investigation, blew the campaign up — and now he’s the president of the United States, so let’s make this thing work.

Was there a point where you decided your policy objectives were not worth the larger risk that he represented? The problem is, he was president! He wasn’t leaving. It’s not as if you can just pull a president from office.

There is a mechanism for that. Yes, I’m familiar with that. But he was the president of the United States. We needed to make it work. That was my strong conviction. Did I think he was going to improve and grow in the job? Yeah. He didn’t. It was after I left when he really went off the rails. He was getting rid of the people who were telling him what he needed to hear, not what he wanted to hear. He steadily eroded the quality of people around him. The first year of his presidency was a lot different than the fourth year. I left after his second year.

You described putting safeguards around Trump. Can you be specific about catastrophes you helped avoid? I remember one day he was going to pull out of NAFTA. [Laughs.] I had to call him: “You will crash the stock market today if you pull out of NAFTA.” He was going to veto Section 702 of FISA. Section 702 is the part of the law that we use to surveil foreign terrorists in foreign jurisdictions — not U.S. citizens. He watched something on TV where some commentator said, I can’t believe Donald Trump is signing this bill, this is what they use to spy on him. Then he puts a tweet out saying, “I’m vetoing it.” We already had the bill on the floor! It was expiring at the end of the week. We were going to go dark on terrorists. We had to talk him out of it for the next three hours. It’s Pompeo and Kelly and Devin Nunes getting on the phone, explaining to him how he’s wrong and we got to sign this bill. Those are two stories off the top of my head. We would have gone dark on terrorists! We would have pulled out of NAFTA without telling the Mexicans and the Canadians!

Ryan with President-elect Donald Trump, his wife Melania, and Vice President-elect Mike Pence on Capitol Hill in 2016.
Al Drago/The New York Times

You’ve talked elsewhere about the need for the Republican presidential primary field to stay small so that the vote doesn’t split and then Trump wins. But beyond “not Trump,” is there a person whom you’d like to see support consolidate behind? Too early to say. The key is that we consolidate the field in time. I don’t think you can prevent people from getting in the race. What the party donors and influencers can do is whittle the field down faster: “You got 6 percent in Iowa. You got 8 percent in New Hampshire. Get out of this race.” But I don’t think Trump is going to get the nomination. The ace in the hole reason is that he’s unelectable. Even most of MAGA knows this. We’re far better with X person.

You’re on the board at Fox, which has had more than a little to do with amplifying the performance-art politics that you say is a problem. I understand a point you’ve made in other interviews, which is the pluralistic need for private media companies to serve different markets, but are there ways in which the symbiotic nature of Fox News and Republican politics could function differently so the result is healthier discourse? I do hope for that, and I think about that a lot. One of the reasons why I chose to be on this board is because I believe you have to have a strong enough commercial cultural institution in society to stand up against a left-wing takeover. That means people like me need to fight for the soul of our party. I don’t agree with a lot of the editorial guys. I don’t believe in this blood-and-soil nationalism. I think it’s dangerous. I am a traditional, classic liberal, pro-life, strong national defense, free-market conservative, which means constitutional limited government. The question is, can we compete for better content and offer a better version of conservatism? I don’t take my toys and go away and say, I think Tucker was wrong. It’s free competition for ideas. I believe at the end of the day people want substance. Anger-tainment only goes so far.

Is Fox taking the Dominion lawsuit as a sign that anything went too far? I don’t want to touch that. That’s ongoing litigation. I’m not going to get into that.

If you were in Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s position, how would you be strategizing about how to get anything done? Because wrangling this Republican caucus seems hellacious. To be good at these jobs, you’ve got to be willing to lose these jobs, and Kevin’s going to face moments like that. You’re going to have blow-ups: the debt limit and the fiscal-year appropriation bills. They’ll get through, crisis will be averted. But after that there’s an opportunity to help shape the presidential election. Get your party focusing on ideas and policies and offering it to the country. Do it before a nominee arrives, so that if we win that election, we have shown the country what our solutions look like. But that’s going to take real leadership, real ideas, real plans, and you’ll have to get past the demagoguery that is dominating the debate these days.

Do you think McCarthy is willing to lose the speaker job? I do. People in the press think he only wanted this job, he’s finally got the job, he wants to hang on to the job. Knowing Kevin, I believe that now that he has the job, he understands its responsibilities and will fulfill those responsibilities.

House Republicans are talking about investigating the Jan. 6 commission. You’re in Woodward and Costa’s book with tears in your eyes on that day saying that Trump fomented this. What’s your perspective on the value of that potential investigation? Let’s stop carrying Donald Trump’s baggage. He’s not fit for the job, and if we nominate him again, we’re guaranteed a loss. We have basically two bases. We have the MAGA base and the suburban base. Those two give us presidencies. You have to have both. You will kill your suburban base, like we did in the Senate and the House in this last election, if we’re anywhere near Donald Trump. Let’s dump him so that we can win and actually advance our principles. I would not mess with Trump stuff.

Back in your home state, Republican politicians have given credence to election denialism. Do you see a productive way forward for the party there that doesn’t involve fealty to Trump and Trumpism? I think people got sucked into this narrative, and people either believe it or repeat it for political survival to fuel ambition. Those are bad reasons. It’s important to temper your ambition and put it below your principles, below evidence and facts. But in this digital age it is hard to sort myth from facts, demagoguery from truth, because there are very few trusted objective sources of information. Lawyers will come up to me at restaurants in Wisconsin and say, “Is that true?” They’ll have some fantastical conspiracy theory. I was at a supper club at Christmas, and this lawyer I’ve known for pretty much my whole life asked me all these crazy things. Mike Gableman. He was the judge who ran the investigation into the election in Wisconsin. My point is a lot of people get sucked into this, and it’s a bad chapter, and it’s populism that is not tethered to principles. We just have to get past it.

There are valid arguments to be made that the economic policies that you believe in were not healthy for Wisconsin and contributed to the bitterness that enables demagoguery and angry populism. I’m curious about the extent to which you see a link between the two? That’s a really good question. Would I do things differently now, knowing what I know? Yes. I had four auto factories in my district. There are zero now. Two issues that are big populist issues for the left and the right where a classical liberal like me may look out of tune are immigration and trade. I voted for every trade agreement that came through. I helped pass a bunch. The problem is that we need free-trade agreements and to open markets to our products and our services, but we have to hold people to account when they renege and cheat on the rules. One vote that I think about is China and the W.T.O. I thought putting China in the W.T.O. was going to open them up and make them get closer to democracy and capitalism. That’s a vote I might take back. The point I’m trying to make is, the lesson is not “Don’t do trade.” It’s do trade but enforce the rules, get reciprocity and go after cheaters.

Let me ask the question another way: Some neighbor of yours in Janesville who used to work at the GM factory might be thinking, The factory didn’t shut down because another country was cheating — NAFTA didn’t work for me. What’s the political argument you make to that guy in 2023? Four-dollar gas is what killed that plant, and they consolidated the jobs to Texas, so it wasn’t a Mexico thing. But I get the point. My answer to people in Janesville is we have to produce things and sell ’em to the rest of the world if we want to have a good economy, good jobs and good wages. Can we get good deals with other countries so we can have that? That means those other countries have to give us access to their markets if we give them access to our markets, and we have rules that we play by and enforce those rules. That takes three sentences to explain. Three sentences versus one demagogic sentence is hard politics. But you can succeed. You know the area I’m from. It’s not exactly the free-trade capital of America, but I did very well politically. I had to communicate and work hard. It’s easier to demagogue. Unfortunately we have a lot of performers in politics, and we don’t have good political leadership. Biden and Trump are both horrible on confronting the coming debt crisis, for example. They’re playing entitlement demagoguery in a way that means we won’t get anything done.

Ryan, with Kevin McCarthy, speaking to the press after a meeting with President Trump at the White House in 2018.
Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse, via Getty Images

Is entitlement reform remotely politically feasible? Both McCarthy and McConnell have said they’re not touching it. Kevin, I think, was saying this in the context of the debt limit. You don’t use some brinksmanship moment to reform Medicare and Social Security. I assume Mitch was talking about this Rick Scott bill that’s not even really a bill. It’s a process thing that doesn’t make any sense. Mitch is trying to make sure that that doesn’t define us. They’re right to say that’s not the context for entitlement reform. But what the majority should do is educate constituents about these problems and then offer solutions. Biden and Trump are not acting presidential on one of the most important issues facing our country, our debt crisis, and the unraveling of our social contract. The smart move is to offer solutions. That’s why we wrote this book at A.E.I. This is a conservative’s version on how to solve this problem, and I grant that people aren’t all going to agree with these things, but they should bring their own solutions to the table.

I think it’s fair to say that the fundamental arguments made in your book about how to address the debt and strengthen the social contract have to do with growing the economic pie. But isn’t it reasonable to be skeptical about the value of growing the pie if the economically elite keep taking bigger slices and workers’ wages are stagnant? How does growing the pie help if most people wind up scrambling for crumbs? I do not subscribe to zero-sum thinking. People who think one person’s gain comes at another person’s loss, that the pie is fixed and therefore must be redistributed — I don’t believe in any of that. I think life and economics are dynamic. It’s fine, in a free society, that people have different outcomes in their lives. I don’t think we want the lack of liberty that comes with government-made equality. Your question, it’s a good question. I spent my entire life defending the free-enterprise system in Congress. How do you accelerate upward mobility so that more people can get bigger slices of the pie, which is dynamic and can grow or shrink based on policies? I think fixing immigration, addressing labor-market issues is big. Regulatory relief helps. Supply-side fiscal policy can give you the productivity increases that give you wage increases so that people get higher living standards. Then you have to have your safety net wired toward upward mobility. Those are all policy achievements that we can attain as a free society as Americans. But our unserious politics are preventing us from getting there.

I guess the last question I have is more philosophical than anything else. So I read your books, and then I also read a bunch of books that I know were influential on your thinking. They add up, in my reading anyway, to a picture of personal liberty and equality of opportunity that’s primarily economic. But we live in a society in which economic resources directly translate into political ones. So how do we deal with the liberty imbalances that arise when economics means that some people have far more opportunity to participate in the political process and advocate for ideas than others? It’s a great question. I’ll take a stab at two answers. So I think growth policies and growth politics expand the pie. It’s not a question of a fixed pie where you fight over how to distribute the slices. The second point is what you probably don’t see in what you read and my arc of my career: the evolution that I went through. I spent two years and change with Bob Woodson when I was budget chair and ways-and-means chair, running around the country learning about poverty. It became somewhat of an epiphany policywise. My evolution of my thinking is that you need a safety net and a floor that works well to help people get on their feet. Where I part company with the left is I don’t believe in socialism. I don’t believe in equality of outcomes. I believe in opportunity, upward mobility. Society has an obligation to assist people to get there, and we have to design policies that best do that. I probably started my career as a more doctrinaire ideological free-market libertarian and evolved into someone who’s a little more epistemologically closer to Aquinas than, say, Hayek.

But the thing that I’m getting at is the notion of equality of opportunity for fair democratic participation. How do we deal with the liberty problems that result when the rich have more political opportunity than — It’s a free society. With the First Amendment and free society, you’re going to have disequal outcomes, there’s no two ways about it. But that’s the price of liberty and freedom. Charles Koch probably has more sway than the guy I’m looking out my window at right now who’s looking in a trash can. But I’ll take that any day. Because that’s what a free society is.

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Opening illustration: Source photograph by Joshua Roberts/Reuters.

This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.

David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and writes the Talk column. He recently interviewed Lynda Barry about the value of childlike thinking, Father Mike Schmitz about religious belief and Jerrod Carmichael on comedy and honesty.