Ryan photo by Gage Skidmore
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker will speak at the Republican Convention, and is supporting Donald Trump after all.
Never mind Walker’s earlier threat to withhold his support “to make sure he renounces what he says with regards to this judge” (that is, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing the Trump University class-action lawsuit, and whom Trump said was unfit to preside because of his Mexican-American heritage).
Walker was a Ted Cruz supporter, and, in a show of party discipline that makes Wisconsin the envy of the national Republican Party, Wisconsinites voted for Cruz by a healthy sixteen-point margin. That’s despite being home to large, rural, white districts and hard-hit manufacturing communities that have tended to vote for Trump.
“Thus ends the Draft Walker movement,” sighs the conservative website Right Wisconsin in a blog post titled “Scott Walker Caves to Trump.” Walker’s support is “the latest sign that opposition to a Trump nomination is crumbling.”
But that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t giving the opposition more reason to wish they could distance themselves.
On the same day Walker endorsed Trump, fellow Wisconsinite Paul Ryan scolded the Trump campaign for tweeting out a white supremacist meme connecting a Star of David and a pile of money to an image of Hillary Clinton.
Ryan told WTMJ radio host and Never-Trumper Charlie Sykes,
“Look, anti-Semitic images, they’ve got no place in a presidential campaign.”
But, as Jud Lounsbury notes, Ryan has displayed a remarkably flexible moral compass and is still endorsing Trump. Soon he will preside over the Republican Convention in Cleveland. Ryan’s been having a hard time keeping order as Speaker of the House lately.
Let’s see how he handles the Trumpapalooza.
Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee and another Wisconsinite, continues his increasingly desperate call for unity at the convention.
But another prominent Wisconsin Republican, former Walker campaign manager and head of the powerful rightwing Bradley Foundation Michael Grebe, has announced he won’t attend the convention and is giving up his delegate slot, because he doesn’t want to help nominate Trump.
Must be nice to be one of the behind-the-scenes money guys in the Republican Party these days.
Being out front in this circus is increasingly ridiculous.
Ruth Conniff is Editor in Chief of The Progressive.