MACKINAC ISLAND, Michigan – Call me old-fashioned. Boring. Whatever.
I wish we could return to the days not so long ago when Republicans looked more like Paul Ryan than Donald Trump – especially now that the former president carries the label of convicted felon.
Democrats overplayed their hand in prosecuting Trump over falsified business records (which will haunt them come November). The fact remains, however, that Trump spurs endless havoc that distracts from issues and ideas that are actually important to the country.
Ryan, the former U.S. House speaker and 2012 vice presidential candidate, spoke Wednesday to the Detroit Regional Chamber’s Mackinac Policy Conference, Michigan’s premier annual confab of business and political leaders.
Ryan served as speaker during the first half of Trump’s term and helped him achieve some of his biggest policy wins, including the 2017 tax cuts and regulatory reforms. The Wisconsin native is a conservative in the truest sense of the word.
“We as conservatives want to conserve certain principles and policies that make this country great,” Ryan told the conference. “The Constitution, liberty, freedom, self-determination, natural law.”
In other words, Ryan’s got the right ideas without all the drama that Trump and his acolytes create.
It’s what more Republicans used to look like before the MAGA takeover of the GOP.
Trump is guilty. It won’t matter at all this election.
‘A cult of personality populism around Trump’
It’s no surprise that Ryan had hoped to see another Republican other than Trump win the GOP presidential party, and last fall he described former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley as the “most appealing general election candidate we’ve got.”
Haley gave Trump the most competition of the other candidates in the field until she dropped out of the race in March. She has continued to pull a sizable number of votes from Trump in the primaries since she left, which points to how many Republicans want a more traditionally conservative candidate.
“My party has been sort of taken over with populism unmoored or untethered to principle,” Ryan said. “And it’s really a cult of personality populism around Trump.”
Ryan would like a return to the “Reagan coalition” that dominated the GOP for a generation before Trump upended that movement.
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The good news is that Ryan believes this is a temporary moment tied to Trump’s unique populist style. Once Trump is out of the picture, perhaps the grand old party can return to its more principled roots.
“I like populism if it’s attached to principles,” he said. “I like making the principles that I believe in and the policies that I prefer popular. But if it’s populism just for the sake of winning, just for the sake of a person, there’s no tether. There’s no thesis of government. And this is one of the reasons why I think our party is struggling right now.”
Democrats and Republicans have played to extremes
This is not just a Republican problem. Both parties are dealing with polarization and infighting among their own ranks.
Ryan points to how Democrats have let the far left dictate much more of the party’s agenda than they once did.
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The push toward the extremes of both parties – MAGA on the right, progressivism on the left – has alienated large swaths of the country.
“I actually don’t think either of our two parties are really capturing what could be a big working majority in this country that is there for the getting,” Ryan said. “Our party has basically been taken over by MAGA…it’s very populist, but it’s very in your face, and where I come from, it pushed a lot of people out of the party.”
That’s true in Michigan, where I live, and other places as well.
For the good of the country, both Republicans and Democrats would be wise to reconsider their parties’ current trajectories.
Ingrid Jacques is a columnist at USA TODAY. Contact her at ijacques@usatoday.com or on X, formerly Twitter: @Ingrid_Jacques.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump’s guilty verdict means Republicans need a new way forward
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