Former House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday he believes the 2024 Republican presidential nominee will “needless to say” have the opportunity to unseat President Joe Biden — unless that person is former President Donald Trump.
“It is a disaster if we nominate Trump,” Ryan, who also serves on the board of Fox News’ parent company, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Ryan had been asked about remarks from one other GOP Trump critic, former Rep. Liz Cheney, who said at a conference Tuesday that Democrats are “twiddling with fire” in the event that they assume they’ll beat Trump in the final election.
Cheney is correct that Trump “could win,” Ryan said, but “I feel we lose with him.”
“I feel we’re way more prone to lose — we have not won anything with him since he first won in ’16,” Ryan said of Trump. “We lost the House in ’18, the presidency in ’20, the Senate in ’20, and we could have won the Senate in 2022 but for him.”
“I’m for anybody not named Trump,” he added, “because I feel we beat Biden needless to say if we nominate a Republican not named Trump.”
Ryan also brushed aside a reference to his status as a Fox Corp. board member when he was jokingly asked if Chairman Rupert Murdoch would tell him who to endorse in 2024.
Ryan had come under pressure for staying on that board as court documents in a high-profile defamation case revealed Fox hosts privately expressed doubt about Trump’s false election fraud claims that were aired on the network. That defamation case settled for greater than $787 million.
“I will endorse whoever I need,” Ryan said in response.
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.
Ryan had an at-times testy political relationship with Trump, and since leaving Congress in 2019 has openly criticized the previous president. He acknowledged that he has been making the case against Trump “for a very long time,” and that Trump’s base “doesn’t like an individual like me.”
Indeed, Ryan had reportedly sworn off campaigning for Trump in the ultimate weeks of the 2016 election, when his campaign gave the impression to be imperiled following the discharge of the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape of Trump bragging about groping women.
Ryan slams Biden and Trump on entitlements
Now a partner at private equity firm Solamere Capital, Ryan on Wednesday slammed Biden’s economic record and blamed him for prime U.S. inflation ahead of what the White House said shall be a major speech on the economy.
The foremost spending bill that Biden championed early in his term as a crucial step to revitalize a Covid-damaged economy “hit the gas pedal on inflation,” Ryan said. “Clearly all this spending hurt inflation.”
Ryan said he expected “nice rhetoric” and “well-massaged statistics” from Biden’s upcoming speech. “But it is going to be just one other industrial policy play. And that is the stuff that gets you lost many years,” he said.
“If you wish to run capitalism through government like China does, I do not think we’ll win that bidding war,” he added.
The White House didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s request for comment.
Ryan also took a shot at each Trump and Biden for “promising to not reform entitlements.”
“We now have these leaders who’re saying, ‘I’m not going to do anything to stop the debt crisis on this country,'” Ryan said, arguing that the president is “courting disaster in that front.”
Trump, the clear front-runner within the Republican primary field, has repeatedly vowed not to chop Social Security or Medicare, aligning him more closely with Biden than a few of his GOP competitors. Trump and Biden have each attacked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Trump’s top Republican rival, over his past support for Ryan’s plans to restructure programs, despite the fact that DeSantis has backed off that stance.
After it was identified that Trump holds a significant polling lead over the sector, Ryan argued on CNBC that he and Biden “have a symbiotic relationship with one another.”
“They make one of the best case for one another’s candidacies, and it’s a complete disaster for our country,” he said.
He added: “I feel strongly, if we nominate a Republican not named Donald Trump, we win this White House.”
