Mother Jones
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Hear me out. Today Breitbart News published an audio recording of Paul Ryan disowning Donald Trump during the campaign:
In the Oct. 10, 2016 call, from right after the Access Hollywood tape of Trump was leaked in the weeks leading up to the election, Ryan does not specify that he will never defend Trump on just the Access Hollywood tape—he says clearly he is done with Trump altogether.
“I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future,” Ryan says in the audio, obtained by Breitbart News and published here for the first time ever.
This isn’t really big news. We pretty much knew this was what Ryan said back when he said it. But apparently Breitbart has been holding onto this recording until the time came when they could get the maximum mileage from giving Ryan’s remarks another news cycle. That turned out to be today, right after CBO had released a devastating report on Ryan’s health care bill.
Then, a few hours later, someone in the White House leaked an internal analysis that says Ryan’s bill is even worse than CBO says it is—quite a feat, given that CBO trashed the bill pretty comprehensively.
We know that Breitbart and Steve Bannon have long loathed Paul Ryan. So…maybe this was all orchestrated by Bannon? Wait for the CBO wrecking crew to come through, and then release both an embarrassing audiotape of Ryan and an embarrassing White House analysis that confirms just how bad Ryan’s bill is.
Was Trump in on this—waiting until just the right moment to take his revenge on Ryan for insufficient loyalty during the campaign? Or is this Bannon acting on his own? Or just a coincidence? I’m not sure. But one way or another, it sure seems like a coordinated effort to doom Ryan’s bill and wreck his reputation with his own caucus.
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