Just days after donald trump announced his third bid for the White House, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan denounced the twice-impeached former president's political future, calling himself a "Never-Again-trumper."
"I'm proud of the accomplishments [during the Trump administration] -- of the tax reform, the deregulation and criminal justice reform -- I'm really excited about the judges we got on the bench, not just the Supreme Court, but throughout the judiciary," Ryan told ABC News' chief Washington correspondent and "This Week" co-anchor Jonathan Karl in an exclusive interview that aired Sunday. "But I am a Never-Again-trumper. Why? Because I want to win, and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in '18, in '20 and now in 2022."
While Republicans secured the House with a razor-thin majority, they failed to flip the Senate. The "red wave" that was widely predicted this midterm season did not come to pass. Ryan put the blame directly on the former president.
"I personally think the evidence is really clear," Ryan said in his first Sunday show interview since he left office in 2019. "The biggest factor was the trump factor … I think we would have won places like Arizona, places like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire had we had a typical, traditional conservative Republican, not a trump Republican."
"With trump, we lose," he added.
"We lost the House in '18," Ryan continued. "We lost the presidency in '20. We lost the Senate in '20. And now in 2022 we should have and could have won the Senate. We didn't. And we have a much lower majority in the House because of that trump factor."
During the interview, Ryan pointed to the trump-endorsed candidates' lackluster performance during the midterms. At least 30 of the former president's hand-picked candidates, including some of the most notable nominees in various states, lost in their general elections after winning their primaries.
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