Former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Tuesday that he does not plan to vote for former President Trump in November, suggesting he would write another candidate instead.
“Character is very important to me,” Ryan, who left Congress in 2019, counted Yahoo Finance at the Milken Global Institute Conference. “And it’s a job that requires the kind of character he simply doesn’t have.”
“That being said, I really disagree [President Biden] about politics,” he added. “I wrote in Republican last time, I’m going to write in Republican this time.”
Ryan, the head of the Republican House majority during Trump’s first two years in the White House, has become a vocal critic of the former president. He argued that Trump is not a “conservative” but rather an “authoritarian narcissist,” and supported former Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kizinger (R-Ill.) for standing up to the former president.
“Historically speaking, all of your tendencies are basically where narcissism takes you, which is whatever makes you popular, makes you feel good at any given time,” Ryan said in an interview late last year.
“He doesn’t think in classical liberal conservative terms,” he continued at the time. “He thinks in an authoritarian way and has gotten a large part of the Republican base to follow him because he is the cultural warrior.”
The former president also stated that it is “very clear” that Biden won the 2020 election, despite common claims from the former president and his allies to the contrary.
“It was not rigged. It wasn’t stolen,” Ryan said in a 2021 interview. “Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won the election. It’s very clear.”
Ryan left Congress after serving 20 years representing Wisconsin’s 1st District. He was also Senator Mitt Romney’s (R-Utah) running mate in the 2012 presidential election.
Romney, who announced in September that he would retire from the Senate at the end of his term, has also recently emerged as a strong critic of the former president.
The Hill has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.
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