Thursday on Fox News Channel’s “Special Report,” while discussing Speaker of the House Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) meeting with presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer describe it as “a sham marriage.”
Krauthammer said, “I’m not among the many who thought it smoothed over the divide. Yes of course it did rhetorically. But whenever you talk about a process, what you mean is we did not conclude peace. You had a peace process in the Middle East for 50 years. The reason that you have it is to give the appearance that something is happening. But you know there is never going to be an end point. Now here there will be an end point, there will be a point at which Ryan will give a perfunctory endorsement and people will ignore him until November. But the fact that they came out of this, with a joint statement that said, ‘We remain confidant there is a great opportunity to unify the party.'”
“Well the meeting was supposed to do something that would unify the party,” he continued. “To declare that an opportunity exists, is what we already knew. This is a sham marriage and the reason is simple — goodwill on both sides — but Paul Ryan is a conservative, has been all his life and committed to certain conservative principles. Trump has made it clear he’s not a conservative. He’s a nationalist populist. There are a lot of arguments in favor of that. But it isn’t conservatism As he himself stressed, when he said that the Republican party is not called the conservative party. Those are differences you never bridge. By making this a process, and dragging it out, what Ryan has done is to prolong his independence and to be the shelter and the locus of what’s left of conservatism in the party.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
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