Paul Ryan caves to pressure and endorses Trump

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan on Thursday gave in to political pressure to support Donald Trump, writing in an op-ed for his hometown Wisconsin newspaper that he will vote for the presumptive Republican nominee for president this fall.

“It’s no secret that he and I have our differences. I won’t pretend otherwise. And when I feel the need to, I’ll continue to speak my mind. But the reality is, on the issues that make up our agenda, we have more common ground than disagreement,” Ryan wrote in the Gazette, which covers his hometown of Janesville.

Ryan said that he and Trump have “talked at great length” about his concerns over Trump’s candidacy, since Ryan said just under one month ago — the day after Trump essentially clinched the nomination — that he was not ready to support Trump yet.

Ryan wrote that he pressed Trump on his views about abortion and the constitutional restraints on the power of the president but that the “main focus” of their conversations was the five-point agenda that Ryan is unveiling this month. He has said for months that he wants the Republican Party to be a party that is offering solutions and not just opposing people or ideas its members don’t like.

“Through these conversations, I feel confident he would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives. That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall,” Ryan wrote.

Ryan’s comment that he and Trump “have more common ground than disagreement” is hard to square with the fact that Trump has said little to soften his positions on trade, entitlements and immigration. Those are three core parts of Ryan’s legislative agenda and are areas in which Trump holds positions antithetical to the House speaker.

But the speaker was under immense pressure from those in his party to get onboard, and has swallowed his personal distaste for Trump to help unify the Republican Party.

A friend and informal adviser to Ryan, Yuval Levin, told Yahoo News last week that while he expected Ryan to end up voting for Trump, he did not think Ryan would ever “embrace [Trump] completely.”

But Levin admitted then that “when you say you are going to vote for someone, that is probably an endorsement.”

Ryan spokesman Brendan Buck left no room for confusion on Twitter not long after the speaker’s op-ed went public.