title:  Paul Ryan Backpeddles After Trump Meeting, Covers His A** For Endorsement
text: For a time, it seemed that House Speaker Paul Ryan was no fan of the now-presumptive GOP 2016 presidential nominee Donald Trump. After all, Ryan has largely kept his opinions on the GOP primary to himself, but some of Trump s statements and actions were outrageous enough for Ryan to speak out. When Trump refused to out-and-out disavow an endorsement from infamous Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, Ryan spoke up and condemned the idea that the Republican Party could have a presidential nominee who flirted with the endorsements of white supremacist groups. The same thing happened when Trump came out and said that he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States.One would think that these positions would mean that Ryan could not support Trump s nomination; in fact, he recently said that he was  not ready  to go all in for Trump. All of that changed on Thursday morning, though, when Ryan held a closed meeting with Donald Trump. Afterwards, Ryan made a statement to the media that seemed designed to walk back his earlier condemnations of the The Donald. He s talking about  party unity,  and says that he is  very encouraged  by Trump s remarks in their meeting. Ryan would not, however, speak on specifics of what he talked about with Trump. Instead, Ryan and Trump gave the media a joint statement that said that they want GOP leaders to   unite around our shared principles, advance a conservative agenda and do all we can to win this fall.  The statement went on to say: With that focus, we had a great conversation this morning. While we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground. We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal. While speaking to the press after the meeting, Ryan said: This was our first meeting, but it was a very positive step toward unification. It s very important that we don t fake unifying, we don t pretend unification, that we truly and actually unify so we are full strength in the fall. I don t want us to have a fake unification process here. While Ryan didn t flat-out endorse Trump, it seems that he is preparing to do just that in the not-too-distant future, while just a short while ago, we saw him show a bit of common sense and call Trump out for his bigoted rhetoric. But, once a Republican, always a Republican. No scruples whatsoever, so nobody should be surprised at this at all. It seems that Speaker Ryan is just another  party first  GOP shill who doesn t give a damn how absolutely dangerous a Donald Trump presidency would be for this nation and he is clearly preparing to stand behind this narcissistic blowhard as he aims to become America s next dictator president.Featured image via Gage Skidmore/Flickr