Paul Ryan: I Wish We Had a Different Presidential Choice

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a member of the Fox Corporation Board of Directors, said Tuesday on FNC’s “Your World” that American voters have terrible choices for president in November.

Host Neil Cavuto asked, “There is this historic, unprecedented situation that we’re going to have a former president who’s a convicted criminal and we’re going to have a son of a president who’s a convicted criminal. And I’m just wondering what you think of that?”

Ryan said, “Yeah, I think in a country with 350 million people, this is the choice we have. I, like the majority of Americans, wish we had a different choice than the ones that none when we’re being presented with.”

The Swamp’s Rational Hatred For Donald Trump

Authored by Vince Coyner via AmericanThinker.com,

TUESDAY, JUN 11, 2024 - 03:30 PM

As we all know, Democrats and the Swamp hate Donald Trump. They probably hate him more than any president ever. Those elites, including celebrities, journalists, and politicians, used to love Trump, with thousands of them smiling and taking pictures of him over the years.

But not anymore.

All of that changed in 2015 when he decided to run for president. It wasn’t that he was running for president that made him enemy number one, but rather that he was running for president as a Republican.

Of course, being a Republican wasn’t always the polarizing factor that it became in 2015 and beyond. Sure, the media disliked Bush, McCain, and Romney, but they were OK because they were all within the acceptable limits of what could be tolerated and controlled. Trump was and is something altogether different. To understand why he was and is different, look at the people at the heart of the Swamp: the government.

Nancy Pelosi, 84, has spent 47 years in politics. She was a political science major and has no experience in the private sector.

Chuck Schumer, 73, has spent 49 years in politics. He is a lawyer with no private-sector experience.

Hakeem Jeffries, 53, has spent 17 years in politics. He is a lawyer with no private-sector experience.

Joe Biden, 81, has spent 50 years in politics. He is a lawyer with no private-sector experience.

Bernie Sanders, 82, has spent 53 years in politics. He is a political science major who had held a smattering of odd jobs before joining the government.

Adam Schiff, 63, has spent 38 years in politics. He is a lawyer with no private-sector experience.

Pete Buttigieg, 42, has spent 12 years in politics. He is a political science major who spent three years working for consulting giant McKinsey & Co., where most of his work was for NGOs and corporations. He was in the Navy and did a stint in Afghanistan.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 34, has already spent five years in politics. She is an econ and international relations major, before which she was a bartender.

Gavin Newsom, 57, has spent 27 years in politics. He is a political science major. Unlike the politicians named above, he’s had private sector experience because his family friend, the billionaire Gordon Getty, helped fund the PlumpJack winery, which led to stores and restaurants.

Elizabeth Warren, 75, has spent 30 years in politics. When she was young, she spent a year as a public school teacher before obtaining her law degree, doing a short stint practicing law, and then settling in as an academic.

And it’s not just Democrats…

Mitch McConnell, 82, has spent 50 years in politics. He is a lawyer with no private-sector experience.

Kevin McCarthy, 59, has spent 37 years in politics. He has an MBA. His private sector experience was limited to selling sandwiches from his uncle’s yogurt shop during college.

Paul Ryan, 54, spent 28 years in politics before retiring to become a lobbyist. He has a political science and economics degree and worked as a waiter and fitness trainer in college.

So there you have it: Of the dozen or so most powerful people in American government and politics, only one has any real experience running a business (Newsom), and that business was funded by one of the richest men in the world at the time. But somehow, they’re the ones making the laws that increasingly impact the businesses that employ every American and, indeed, the lives and communities of every single American.

For these people, government is virtually everything in life. Most of them know nothing about the private sector, the thing that powers America. They know nothing about running a business, creating jobs, meeting payroll, and perhaps most importantly, doing all of those things while risking everything and trying to abide by a stultifying labyrinth of ever-changing government regulations from an endless array of agencies.

Aside from Newsom, none of them has built anything of any consequence. They have no experience of what it’s like to be in business, where 86% of employed Americans work, run a business, or be an entrepreneur, the economic fount of America. For most of their adult lives, none of them had to worry about the solvency of their next paycheck. Their healthcare plans, and those of their families and their employees’ families, weren’t resting on their success. They haven’t had to worry about selling enough products or services to keep the lights on, the employees’ paid and fresh products on the shelves or services in the pipeline.

Worrying about and conquering those pressures is what created America’s prosperity. Those pressures fund the taxes that Americans pay (money the government turns around and redistributes). Responding to these pressures and succeeding make most Americans’ lives better than those of almost every person in human history, and the people arrayed against Donald Trump have virtually no experience with any of it.

But Trump has done it in spades. He’s built giant hotels during economic turmoil. He’s done so, dealing with unions, the mafia, government regulators, contractors, competitors, bankers and more. He’s built hotels, golf courses, casinos, apartment buildings, communities, and more around the world. He owned the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants. He was a founding member of the USFL, a competitor to the NFL. He was the star and producer of The Apprentice, the business-focused reality show that averaged 14 million viewers per episode for its first six years.

Sure, Trump’s had failures, bankruptcies and lots of lawsuits, but you don’t accomplish anything without risking those outcomes. He’s failed plenty of times, but he’s succeeded far more often. He’s created companies that have met millions of paycheck deadlines, fed tens of thousands of families, and generated billions of dollars in revenue.

Donald Trump accomplishes things. Not only without government but usually despite government. Maybe the best example of this is his renovation of Wollman Rink, a project that had languished for six years in the hands of the NYC government, which wasted $13 million working unsuccessfully on the project. Trump completed it in a matter of months and under budget.

Trump’s accomplishments are what scares the Swamp rats the most. They cannot afford to let Donald Trump, using the White House’s bully pulpit, show Americans that they don’t need the government to succeed, that problems can be solved without government “help,” and to demonstrate that the government is often the problem. If you’re in the government business, that’s a bad thing because, as anyone who’s ever picked up a history book knows, Americans can do extraordinary things when unshackled from government regulation. And once they’re reminded of that, all bets are off.

The last time Trump was president, he said he would drain the Swamp. He didn’t. The truth is, he had no idea how deep or wide the Swamp was and is. Most of us didn’t. Now he does, and we do. This time, he’ll be under no illusions about what he’s up against and, ideally, will act accordingly. The Swamp rats know that. They see the writing on the wall. And it terrifies them.

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