Not betting on it....

Ryan: Trump could win, but I’m not ‘betting’ on it

Sitting down for a lengthy interview, a relaxed but adamant Ryan talks up 'unity' — but still wants the nominee to clean up his act.

By Glenn Thrush

Paul Ryan loves the word “unity,” but his definition of that term differs sharply from Donald Trump’s vision of a smiling speaker at his side, mouth shut and domesticated — just like Chris Christie.

Ryan, who made peace with Trump earlier this month but remains wait-and-see on the question of whether to endorse the presumptive GOP nominee, sees his 2016 job as ensuring that the party doesn’t become a Cult of Trump — he wants to replace id with ideas.

The sooner Trump gets it, the quicker he’ll jump on the unity bus, a relaxed but adamant Ryan suggested during a 45-minute interview last week for POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast.

“When people go to the polls in November, they are not just picking a person … they're also picking a path,” said Ryan, who spoke repeatedly of unity with the front-runner — while refusing to bet on a Trump victory this fall.

“I think this is a ‘we,’ not just one person,” he added. “I very much believe in a type and style of politics that may not be in vogue today but, I still think, nevertheless, is the right kind of politics.”

It was that core belief, he says, more than any rank political calculation, that led Ryan to say he was “just not ready” to back Trump in a shocker of a CNN interview on May 6. Standing in front of an idyllic waterfall, Ryan said he wanted to see “a standard-bearer that bears our standards” and called on Trump to rein in his worst impulses if he wanted his support.

The two men met days later in Washington, amid wall-to-wall coverage. The meeting was amicable, though noncommittal, with the duo issuing a post-confab statement saying, “We … remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall.”

In our interview, the speaker put a finer, sharper point on that — and positioned himself as the conscience of the conservative movement, with plans to counterprogram Trump’s bombast with the low-tax, lean-government budget substance that has made him a darling on the right. And he doesn’t seem to be willing to relinquish the leverage he has gained by holding out, even as top House deputies, like Kevin McCarthy, flock to Trump’s banner.

When I asked Ryan if he intends to keep calling out Trump, he responded like a high school dean talking about a truant who happens to be the most popular kid at school. “I will,” he said. “I've done that in the past, and I will do that in future if need be, and I hope it’s not necessary.”

Is Trump a conservative “at his core?” I asked. He punted.

“You should ask him those questions,” said Ryan. “I'm not the person to be giving you the breakdown of Donald Trump. That's not my job and responsibility.”

OK, how about Trump’s prospects in November against Hillary Clinton?

Sure, Ryan allowed, he’s got a chance — and he predicts the rise of “Trump Democrats.”

But when I pushed him, asked if he would bet his own money on a Trump victory, he demurred. “I'm not going to — I'm not a betting man,” he said — adding a list of conditions that, more or less, contradicted Trump’s entire approach to politics thus far. “I think if we get our party unified, and if we do the work we need to do to get ourselves at full strength, and if we offer the country a clear and compelling agenda that is inspiring, that is inclusive, that fixes problems, that is solutions-based and based on good principles, then, yes, I think we can win.”

Ryan wears his new power easily. As House Ways and Means chairman he’d breeze past reporters, earbuds affixed, Zeppelin or AC/DC blaring over questions shouted in his wake by reporters. And he’s retained that same sense of gliding ease after his ascent to the speakership last October.

In public, he projects an air of bemused tranquility, the more frenzied the moment — like the mayhem surrounding the Trump state visit — the wider the Eddie Haskell grin, the sprightlier the stride past the press pack. But there’s an edge to Ryan in private, a whiff of vigilant anxiety — the knee pivots under the table when we talk.

Ryan’s biggest regret about the 2012 campaign was his excessive seriousness (“I needed to be more unplugged”) — and he admires Trump’s shoot-from-the-lip style. “I think he's refreshing in that he takes on political correctness … the off-the-cuff, more natural, unscripted element is what is refreshing to people,” he said — but added, “within limits.”

When I asked him whether he thought he defeated an aggressive and dismissive Joe Biden during their one vice-presidential debate in 2012, he said, “I got exactly what I wanted to get out of that debate. I think I won.”

He added: “Voters were asking ‘Who is this young guy? He looks pretty young. Can he handle himself?’ Joe tried getting me to get rattled, to lose my thought or become intemperate, and an intemperate 68-year-old usually beats an intemperate 42-year-old.”

He’s nothing if not temperate. Ryan still sleeps in his drafty personal office in a House office building, travels back to his family in Janesville, Wisconsin, almost every weekend, rises at dawn to work out, drifts off to bed at 9 p.m. most nights and exorcises his demons by mind-moshing to the hard-rock and metal playlist of a Midwestern bro in early middle age. (Among the most animated moments of our conversation: When I mention my annoyance at the installation of screechy Guns ‘N Roses singer Axl Rose as a raspy-voiced Brian Johnson’s replacement in AC/DC. “Has he put gravel in his voice?” Ryan asks about Rose. “If he smoked a couple of packs a day for the last 10 years, maybe he'd be better.”).

Situational awareness, the wary scanning of every situation for hazards, is a hallmark of Ryan’s rapid rise in GOP politics but also a product of childhood tragedies. During high school, he found his father, who ran the family’s generations-old contracting business, dead in bed. Soon after, his grandmother, who was dying of Alzheimer’s, moved in to live out her final years.

When I asked one longtime Ryan observer to describe him, he pointed me to the mid-1960s New Yorker writer John McPhee’s essay on a then-Princeton basketball player named Bill Bradley. McPhee titled his essay “A Sense of Where You Are,” a reference to Bradley’s intuitive ability to maneuver deftly in tight spaces despite possessing limited athletic talent. “That’s Paul, too,” the friend said.

It’s remains to be seen how deft Ryan really is, although he’s certainly in a tight spot. On one side, he’s hemmed in by Trump — a more popular figure than he is among Republicans — an interloper who seized the mantle of party pathfinder that Ryan wanted to occupy when he accepted the speaker’s gavel last fall; on the other is the raucous, ferociously uncooperative Freedom Caucus of hard-core conservatives spooked (and befuddled) by the emergence of a presidential candidate who shares their rage but not necessarily their hard-right policy positions.

Ryan’s ability to keep them from sidetracking his speakership is the biggest question he faces. “Hopefully, what House conservatives can do is add … a rudder to the ship to give it some substance and some direction and some vision, along with our nominee,” he said over yards of polished oak tabletop in his conference room on the second floor of the Capitol.

The carpet and drapes in the speaker’s suite are new — he ripped out John Boehner’s smoke-sallowed leftovers shortly after taking over in October — although half the paintings on the wall are pasteboard replicas of Washington and Jefferson because the Library of Congress wouldn’t subject real oil paintings to Boehner’s nicotine fog.

Ryan is only now facing his biggest test as speaker, as he dives into the messy budget process, more than half a year after Boehner did him the supreme favor of finalizing a deal to give his successor breathing room.

Ryan’s attitude towards Boehner is ambivalent: He likes the former speaker personally, but thinks he didn’t adjust to the changes in his ranks — and jokes that the Ohio Republican laid on “the Catholic guilt” with him when McCarthy, who was in line for the job, belly-flopped.

“I think one of the reasons the members wanted me to do this, and get whatever people think power is here, is because I didn’t want it,” Ryan told me. “John did everything he could. It’s just I think they realized that I’m more responsible with it and I’m more in this for serving our principles, not serving my career, because I didn’t want this as my career. I think that’s why people are more receptive to my style of leadership and in the kind of direction we're trying to go.”

But the notion that the Republican House of Representatives — the problem child of GOP politics, the source of civil-war government shutdowns, an institution whose approval rating is still sub-20 percent — can be a rock of reasonable policy stability in the Trump era seems like a frozen-taffy stretch.

To do that, Ryan is urging his members to do something they have never been able to do: shut up.

“I think some people led others to believe that we could, for instance, get rid of Obamacare while Obama was in office,” he told me, clearly referring to the dozens of feckless anti-Obamacare votes pushed by the tea party. “I think we allowed expectations to rise beyond our capabilities, and that demoralized not only our supporters, our constituents, but our members. And I have worked hard at trying to keep expectations rooted in reality so that we don't oversell and underdeliver.”

For all his criticism of Trump, Ryan reserves the real vitriol for Hillary Clinton, dismissing her as “old-fashioned” — and echoes Trump in suggesting that the former secretary of state hasn’t done much in public life besides soaking up reflected glory. “I don't think she's been successful in her own right, especially with foreign policy as secretary of state,” he tells me.

His views on Barack Obama, his bargaining partner for the next nine months, are just as jaundiced. Ryan doesn’t forget the slights over the years — the president ran against Ryan’s belt-tightening budget plan in 2012 — and repeatedly attacked him in public. “I think he’s a very dogmatic, ideological person,” Ryan said. “He thinks I’m an ideological guy, too, and, you know, to a degree I am. I mean, I’m a conservative.”

Ryan offers tempered praise for two Democrats — both of them Clinton foils. He thinks Joe Biden would have been a “tougher opponent” than Clinton, “for sure.”

And Ryan — since his teens, a disciple of the conservative, anti-communitarian Vienna school of economic theory — grudgingly admires the populist messaging of socialist Bernie Sanders.

“Look, as conservatives, we hate crony capitalism,” added Ryan, who has raised more than his share of cash from the financial services industry. “We need to do a better job as Republicans, going after crony capitalism. … In a weird way, this is what Bernie Sanders is railing against, which is a rigged system.”

The other candidate who has also been raising that issue, of course, is a certain billionaire reality-show star who is targeting the GOP establishment Ryan now (by default) represents.

And that’s probably Ryan’s biggest problem with Trump: They don’t agree on policy specifics, despite the businessman’s willingness to shape-shift. Ryan opposes Trump’s Muslim ban, the candidate’s newfound openness to hike taxes on the rich and the minimum wage and Trump’s proposed immigration crackdown, which Ryan views as extreme and impractical.

“I’ve made no secret about my concern for the tone,” the speaker said of his disagreements with Trump. “But it was [on] the substance, too.”

When I asked him the ultimate question — is Trump capable of the change Ryan seeks? — he offered a wry grin.

“Anything is possible.”