Former House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday he believes the 2024 Republican presidential nominee will “for sure” be able to unseat President Joe Biden — unless that person is former President Donald Trump.
“It’s 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 another GOP Trump critic, former Rep. Liz Cheney, who said at a conference Tuesday that Democrats are “playing with fire” if they assume they can beat Trump in the general election.
Cheney is right that Trump “could win,” Ryan said, but “I think we lose with him.”
“I think we’re much more likely to lose — we haven’t 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 think we beat Biden for sure 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 more than $787 million.
“I’m going to endorse whoever I want,” Ryan said in response.
A spokesman for Trump’s campaign did not immediately respond 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 former president. He acknowledged that he has been making the case against Trump “for a long time,” and that Trump’s base “doesn’t like a person like me.”
Indeed, Ryan had reportedly sworn off campaigning for Trump in the final weeks of the 2016…
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