The Ryan-Trump Summit Thursday’s summit could be the beginning of a useful, if not beautiful, relationship. Daniel Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ryan-trump-summit-1463008193
Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are the two leaders in the Republican Party’s Cold War. Which one is the U.S. and the other the Soviet Union is beside the point. What matters is that Republican Party factions—once again—are on the nuclear brink. On Thursday the two men will hold a summit meeting at a neutral site, with the Republican National Committee headquarters serving as Reykjavik.
Mr. Ryan has said he isn’t ready to endorse Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump replied that if the Speaker can’t support him, so what?
Suffice to say that before now, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone that a party platform of mutually assured destruction was a strategy for winning the presidency.
Anyone who went through the U.S. education system before it fell apart is familiar with the saying: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The man who said that was talking about the human compulsion to repeat national nightmares.
Stepping back from a nightmarish brink is precisely what House Republicans did mere months ago, when they elected Mr. Ryan as House Speaker. Some seem to have forgotten what a corrosive, destructive and potentially self-annihilating mess that was for the Republicans. And here they go again.
Last September, under siege from the most conservative members of the Republican House Conference, John Boehner announced his intention to resign as Speaker.
His presumptive successor, Rep. Kevin McCarthy, abruptly ended his candidacy to succeed Mr. Boehner, and House Republicans descended into chaos.
The House’s 40 or so conservatives, the Freedom Caucus, seemed unappeasable. Insults and threats of retribution were rife. The White House and indeed pretty much everyone mocked the Republicans as ungovernable and incapable of governing.
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