Former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan said he will not be voting for Donald Trump in the upcoming election, slamming his character in a Fox News interview on Tuesday.
When Fox News host Neil Cavuto asked Ryan, who voted for Trump in 2016, what “put him off,” Ryan said it is a “contribution of things” but namely Trump’s lack of moral principles.
“I think it really is just character at the end of the day, and the fact that if you’re willing to put yourself above the Constitution ― an oath you swear when you take federal office, whether as president or a member of Congress, you swear an oath to the Constitution ― and you’re willing to suborn it to yourself, I think that makes you unfit for office,” Ryan told Cavuto.
It’s not the first time Ryan has made his contempt for Trump known. He called Trump a “populist, authoritarian narcissist,” who thinks in an “authoritarian way,” in an interview last year. Having served as a speaker of the House for two years of Trump’s term, Ryan began openly criticizing the former president after he left office. “Did I think he was going to improve and grow in the job? Yeah. He didn’t," Ryan told The New York Times Magazine in 2023.
In the Fox News interview on Tuesday, Ryan, who is a Fox Corporation board member, also criticized Trump’s negative impact on the GOP.
“He’s cost us a lot of seats,” Ryan said. “He cost us the Senate twice. He cost us the House because he is nominating, he is pushing through the primaries people who cannot win general elections but who pledge fealty to him.”
Ryan made it clear he does not support President Joe Biden either, whose policies he called “terrible." He sympathized with American voters who he said have been given two “terrible choices” for the upcoming November election.
“In a country with 350 million people, this is the choice we have?” Ryan said. “I, like the majority of Americans, wish we had a different choice.”
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