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Paul Ryan Stands Behind Endorsement of Donald Trump Despite Clash Paul Ryan Stands Behind Endorsement of Donald Trump Despite Clash
(about 5 hours later)
Speaker Paul D. Ryan declined to rescind his endorsement of Donald J. Trump on Thursday, making his first comments on his latest flare-up with the Republican candidate since Mr. Trump refused to back the Wisconsin congressman in his re-election race. PORTLAND, Me. — Facing urgent calls to stabilize his candidacy and declining poll numbers, Donald J. Trump struggled on Thursday to refocus his message after threatening to withhold his endorsement from top Republican officeholders, including Paul D. Ryan, the speaker of the House.
Mr. Ryan said Mr. Trump won the party’s nomination “fair and square,” earning the most primary votes, and deserved the support of Republican elected leaders. Mr. Trump’s campaign has existed in a state of crisis for a full week now, since his criticism of a Muslim military family set off a war of words between Mr. Trump and a host of Republicans who have repudiated his comments. There were only scattered signs of healing on Thursday between Mr. Trump and the party he nominally leads.
“We are a party where the grass-roots Republican primary voter selects our nominee,” Mr. Ryan told a talk radio station in Green Bay, Wis. “And I think there’s something to be said about respecting those voters.” Mr. Trump played down the friction between him and Mr. Ryan at a campaign stop here on Thursday, calling Mr. Ryan a “good guy” and discouraging a supportive crowd from booing Mr. Ryan’s name. In turn, Mr. Ryan said he continued to support Mr. Trump, calling it a matter of respect for the will of the voters.
He brushed off Mr. Trump’s comment on Tuesday that he was “not quite” ready to endorse Mr. Ryan, who faces a long-shot primary challenge on Tuesday from a Wisconsin businessman. Mr. Trump also publicly complimented Mr. Ryan’s challenger, Paul Nehlen. The jousting echoes the battle playing out across the Republican Party between Mr. Trump’s populist insurgency and the establishment. But Mr. Trump still did not express support for Mr. Ryan’s re-election or for two Republican senators, John McCain of Arizona and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who are both seeking re-election. And he was frustrated in his effort to move past the controversy with an audacious foray into Maine, a solidly Democratic state in presidential elections.
Mr. Trump plans to campaign in Green Bay on Friday, but Wisconsin’s top three Republicans — Mr. Ryan, Gov. Scott Walker and Senator Ron Johnson — are skipping the event. Testing his appeal with a stump speech in Portland, a liberal downstate city, Mr. Trump was repeatedly interrupted by young demonstrators brandishing pocket-size copies of the Constitution — a reference to Khizr Khan, the father of an American soldier killed in Iraq, who charged that Mr. Trump had never read the document.
Speaking to a conservative radio host, Jerry Bader, Mr. Ryan said Mr. Trump’s string of recent outbursts was distressing, particularly his criticism of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Capt. Humayun Khan, who was killed defending his Army unit in 2004. There is mounting pressure on Mr. Trump to regain his footing in the race and repair some of the damage he has sustained in swing states. Already trailing Hillary Clinton in national polls, Mr. Trump has also fallen badly behind in a battery of state-level surveys released over the course of the week.
“He’s had a pretty strange run since the convention,” Mr. Ryan said of Mr. Trump. “You would think that we want to be focusing on Hillary Clinton, on all of her deficiencies.” He trailed Mrs. Clinton by 6 percentage points in Florida, according to a Suffolk University poll, and by 11 points in Pennsylvania in a poll taken by Franklin & Marshall College. Polls by local television stations in New Hampshire and Michigan found Mr. Trump well behind Mrs. Clinton in both states. This dire polling may further undermine Mr. Trump’s deteriorating relationship with Republicans in Washington.
Mr. Ryan and most other Republican officials have treaded a narrow line critiquing Mr. Trump, all the while being careful not to repudiate him, for fear of losing Republican base voters. Mr. Trump’s running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, also startled Republicans on Thursday when he declined to say if he would back Mr. McCain and Ms. Ayotte. Mr. Pence, who broke with Mr. Trump on Wednesday to back Mr. Ryan, dodged a reporter’s question on the subject.
On Wednesday, the handful of elected Republicans who have disowned Mr. Trump grew larger, with two congressmen, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania, saying they would not endorse him. A third House member, Mike Coffman of Colorado, a Marine veteran who served in Iraq, released a TV ad saying that he would “stand up” to Mr. Trump. “I look forward to supporting Republican candidates in the days and weeks ahead all over the country, and so does Donald Trump,” Mr. Pence said. “But the stakes in this election are so high. To restore our country and home and abroad, we need new leadership.”
Mr. Ryan was not willing to go so far. Asked on the radio show whether his support for Mr. Trump could ever reach “a bridge too far,” he said, “None of these things are ever blank checks.” Against that tumultuous backdrop, Mr. Trump nevertheless projected feisty optimism during a visit to Maine, one of two states with the eccentric practice of awarding its Electoral College votes based on the popular vote in each of its congressional districts.
Mr. Trump said some people believed he could pick up a single Electoral College vote in the northernmost of the state’s two districts. But in an auditorium in Portland’s City Hall, Mr. Trump said he was hopeful about turning the whole state red for the first time since 1988.
“We have such incredible people up here,” he said. “We have people that like Donald Trump.”
He drew rounds of applause with now-familiar riffs about keeping dangerous refugees out of the United States and building a wall on the border with Mexico. Attacking President Obama for arranging a large financial payment to Iran, Mr. Trump described seeing a video of a plane landing in Iran bearing cash in several currencies — even though there is no evidence that such a video exists. (At a news conference shortly after, Mr. Obama denounced criticism by Mr. Trump and others of the payments.)
Yet Mr. Trump found a turbulent reception inside and outside the hall, where a crowd of demonstrators assembled. Several held up signs describing Mr. Trump as a fascist, and a few women held placards quoting Margaret Chase Smith, a Maine senator who vocally opposed Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
During his remarks, Mr. Trump drew repeated interruptions from the demonstrators who silently held up miniature copies of the Constitution, some of them with the logo of the American Civil Liberties Union on the back. As they were escorted out of the room, the protesters faced jeers from Mr. Trump’s supporters; several said they had been jostled or had their pocket Constitutions snatched away.
Julia Legler, one of more than a dozen demonstrators, said the group objected to “Islamophobic, anti-Muslim garbage” emanating from the Trump campaign. She said their inspiration was Mr. Khan who brandished his own pocket-size Constitution at the Democratic convention last week.
“The goal was to make a statement, support Khizr Khan and, honestly, expose that Trump supporters have no ideas what they are talking about,” said Ms. Legler, 24.
Mr. Trump was dismissive of the protest, calling it “sort of rude.” As the crowd chanted over the demonstrators, Mr. Trump said several times in a weary tone: “Do whatever you want.”
As Mr. Trump’s candidacy has come under intensifying strain this week, he has sharpened his attacks on Mrs. Clinton, at times wielding unusually barbed language, even by the standards of his campaign. In Pennsylvania on Monday, Mr. Trump described the Democratic nominee as “the devil.”
And in Maine, Mr. Trump responded with approval when his top supporter in the state, Gov. Paul LePage, whipped up the crowd in a speech branding Mrs. Clinton “the queen of corruption.”
“We need to reject corrupt politicians,” Mr. LePage said. “We need to reject self-enrichment. We need to make sure that we, the people of this country, defeat the queen of corruption.”
Joining Mr. LePage onstage, Mr. Trump responded enthusiastically. “I think,” he said, “we are going to have to use that.”