‘I didn’t see this one coming’
Speaker Ryan on Trump elex shock
House Speaker Paul Ryan has admitted that he was stunned when long-shot candidate Donald Trump won the GOP presidential nomination — let alone the White House.
“I didn’t see this one coming,” Ryan told CBS’s “60 Minutes” in an interview set to air Sunday. “He knows that. Donald Trump’s a very — he was a very unconventional candidate. He’s going to be an unconventional president. What I like about it, is he’s just a get-things-done kinda guy.”
During the presidential campaign, Ryan condemned Trump for alleging that an American judge could not be fair to him because of the jurist’s “Mexican heritage.” The speaker said it was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
But in this weekend’s interview, Ryan denied calling the mogul, who had harsh words for Mexicans during the campaign, a racist.
“No, I didn’t. I said his comment was,” Ryan said.
During the waning days of the campaign, the Wisconsin congressman played coy with his endorsement.
After saying in June that he would vote for Trump, he threatened to withdraw his support following the October release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump is heard using crude language to boast about grabbing women.
The speaker said then that he was focusing not on Trump but on keeping the House in GOP hands, prompting Trump to suggest Ryan was trying to sabotage the campaign.
But the two have apparently rebuilt whatever bridges had been burned, with the top House Republican saying he and the president-elect now speak daily.
“We’re fine. We’re not looking back. We’re looking forward,” Ryan said.
They discuss a range of topics, he added, including reclaiming congressional power from the executive branch of the federal government.
“We’ve talked about — the Constitution, Article I on the Constitution, the separation of powers. He feels very strongly, actually, that under President Obama’s watch, he stripped a lot of power away from the Constitution, away from the legislative branch of government. And we want to reset the balance of power, so that people and the Constitution are rightfully restored,” Ryan said.