This is breaking news — that Speaker Ryan has gathered his House Caucus and told them that he will not be defending Trump or campaigning with Trump. He also advised the members of his caucus to do what they needed to do, but he (Ryan) would be working to preserve congressional majorities:
House Speaker Paul D. Ryan dealt a hammer blow to Donald J. Trump’s presidential candidacy Monday, telling Republican lawmakers that he would no longer defend Mr. Trump and would focus instead on defending the party’s majority in Congress.
But in an illustration of Mr. Trump’s powerful grip on much of the party, Mr. Ryan faced angry blowback from conservative lawmakers supportive of Mr. Trump.
After Mr. Ryan announced his decision in a conference call Monday morning, a stream of hard-liners came on the line to urge their colleagues not to give up on Mr. Trump, and complained that Mr. Ryan was effectively conceding the presidency.
Mr. Ryan initially urged his members to focus on their own re-election campaigns and to make individual decisions about how to handle Mr. Trump, according to two people who were on the call, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Ryan is not “unendorsing” Trump, just not doing any work to elect him.
This is a day where the media narrative seems to be that Trump stopped the exodus of his “elite” support. And then Paul Ryan tells his caucus that his time is better spent on getting them re-elected. It made me wonder if the story the other day that the RNC is cutting Trump off from funds might have some truth to it. If you read the rest of the article, you can see the level of blowback Ryan got in this call today. It is, of course, their own fault — having to win back the districts they drew that concentrated the wingnuts together. So now they have their “safe” GOP districts and they are faced with plenty of their base who are going to be mad as hell that the party and the party elites won’t back Trump. Many of them can’t count on courting a broader coalition, since they functionally cut that effort off after the party’s self-assessment after Obama’s last win.
So here’s another battle in the GOP civil war and it’s all their own fault.