Even after his much-anticipated meeting with the presumptive Republican nominee earlier this month, Paul Ryan still wasn’t ready to jump on the Trump bandwagon. The most we got from the Speaker of the House was that the meeting was encouraging, but unification is a process that takes time.
According to reports, however, it seems Ryan may now be on the verge of ending his standoff with the businessman.
House Speaker Paul Ryan has begun telling confidants that he wants to end his standoff with Donald Trump in part because he’s worried the split has sharpened divisions in the Republican Party, according to two people close to the lawmaker.
Ryan aides say nothing has been decided about a possible Trump endorsement. But Trump’s campaign manager, Paul Manafort, told a small group of Republican lawmakers Thursday that he expects Ryan to endorse the party’s nominee as early as this week, according to two people in the meeting.
If Ryan were to endorse Trump, the move would end a nearly unprecedented standoff between the House speaker and his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, and remove the biggest remaining obstacle to Trump’s efforts to unite Republicans around his campaign.
In fact, Manafort told the gathering of Republican lawmakers that Ryan’s endorsement would put more pressure on the party’s remaining Trump holdouts to fall in line. […]
It’s not clear how Ryan, who said that he wasn’t interested in a "fake unification" of his party, would choreograph an endorsement after his initial public reluctance.
Ryan told Politico in an interview on Monday that he believes he can help play a role in unifying the GOP. “I don't want to see our party divided,” he said. “The people in the primaries are speaking.”