Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is fighting an uphill battle to keep the focus on the GOP’s tax cuts and the economy in the face of a news cycle dominated by President Trump’s White House.

Ryan has aggressively talked up the benefits of the tax cuts, promoting the law last week in a conference call with a group backed by GOP donors Charles and David Koch and in a visit to Home Depot’s Store Support Center in Atlanta.

But it can be a challenge for Ryan to win the spotlight given competition in the news cycle — from Trump’s decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, to Trump’s decision to defy his party and impose steep tariffs on steel and aluminum, to the news about his alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels.

Before the new tax law passed, Ryan traveled the country arguing that it would help the economy and the middle class. On Friday, the Department of Labor announced the economy added more than 300,000 jobs in February, a boon to the Ryan argument.

Yet the news on jobs didn’t dominate on cable. And at the Home Depot visit, Ryan was asked about the $130,000 payment that Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to Daniels during the 2016 election as part of a nondisclosure agreement regarding the alleged affair.

The midterm elections are expected to be challenging for Republicans, given that Trump’s approval rating is low and the president’s party typically loses seats in the contests.

GOP strategist Ford O’Connell said Ryan is right to tout the tax cuts and the economy, but doing so may not provide Republicans the boost they need everywhere.

“The tax bill and the economy are not yet resonating in the way that the White House would like it to,” he said. 

Read more from Naomi Jagoda at The Hill

Ironically, President Trump – a dealmaker in his past life – was nowhere to be seen when the deal to reopen the government was struck.

Mr. Trump had spent the weekend holed up in the White House, talking with friends, aides, and key Republican lawmakers, watching his surrogates speak for him on television, and perhaps most important, steering clear of top Democrats. Even his Twitter account stayed on message.

This was all by design, stage-managed by advisers who sought to prevent the chaos of the past few weeks from spilling over into the high-stakes arena of a partial government shutdown.

The gambit worked. Democratic leaders quickly concluded that Trump wasn’t going to address the plight of Dreamers – unauthorized immigrants brought to the US as children – as part of a short-term spending bill, and so most Democrats voted to reopen the government. In exchange, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky pledged to take up immigration issues, including Dreamers, by early February.

The president’s defenders say Trump’s hands-off approach was, in fact, in keeping with his past as a businessman. He was doing what CEOs are supposed to do: delegate.

“There’s no question that Trump is still learning how to govern,” says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “In this instance he was smart to let his lieutenants – in this case, Senator McConnell and [House Speaker Paul] Ryan – work it out themselves, while saying essentially, I’m not giving in on Dreamers.”

Illegal immigration was a central issue for Trump in the 2016 presidential election, and “Republicans on Capitol Hill are willing to fight for him and do what he wants,” Mr. O’Connell says. “But he needs to be clearer about what it is he wants.”

Read more from Linda Feldmann at The Christian Science Monitor

Tiring of the endless drama of the Trump era, anticipating the House going to the Democrats in next year’s midterms, and weary of the three-ring circus Congress has become, it’s small wonder that House Speaker Paul Ryan is ready to go.

House staff members and others familiar with Ryan’s thinking confirmed to the Herald reports he is privately considering hanging up his gavel after the midterms — or possibly even earlier, to avoid the headache of another re-election bid for himself.

On the record, Ryan denied to reporters that he’s headed for the exit.

In some ways, Ryan’s situation is similar to the one that caused Boehner to walk away — warring factions from within his party that made even repealing Obamacare impossible.

“The rest of the country does understand that it is hard as heck to herd 435 cats,” said GOP strategist Ford O’Connell. “Frankly there is no position, other than president of the United States, that is going the be harder than the position he has right now.”

Read more from Kimberly Atkins at the Boston Herald

The Republican Obamacare replacement bill is proving to be absolute poison on the campaign trail, where party candidates range from noncommittal to downright hostile.

“I am against it,” said Corey Stewart, who is battling for the Republican nomination in the Virginia governor’s race. “It doesn’t go far enough. Look, a bunch of politicians in Washington are never going to be able to create an efficient one-size-fits-all health care system.”

The plan also has been met with disdain in Georgia, where 11 Republicans are running for the seat left vacant by President Trump’s health and human services secretary. Several of the candidates — including Amy Kremer and Bob Gray — have panned the plan as “Obamacare-lite” and said conservatives instead should deliver on the full repeal they promised on the campaign trail.

For Republican leaders already having a tough time selling their bill in Washington, the last thing they need is a steady dose of negative reaction from candidates running in elections back home.

“The Republicans on the Hill are trying to put out the fire, and these guys are throwing accelerant on the fire,” said Ford O’Connell, a party strategist.

“You are shooting yourself and the long-term prospects for President Trump in the foot when you do this,” he said, arguing that Republicans need to show they can govern. “These guys have to grow a backbone, hold the line and see the big picture because the more successful Trump is, the more successful they will be.”

Read more from Seth McLaughlin at The Washington Times

Donald Trump bid good riddance to House Speaker Paul Ryan and establishment Republicans, casting their efforts to shun him as a liberation — a move that a local Trump campaign official said could spark a run on Ryan’s power.

“It is so nice that the shackles have been taken off me and I can now fight for America the way I want to,” Trump tweeted yesterday, throwing gasoline on a fire started Monday by a conference call in which Ryan directed GOP candidates to focus on their own re-elections, not Trump’s run.

Trump mocked Ryan’s call in a separate tweet, referring to the Wisconsin Republican as “Our very weak and ineffective leader,” and saying Ryan “had a bad conference call where his members went wild at his disloyalty.”

State Rep. Geoffrey G. Diehl, co-chair of Trump’s Massachusetts campaign, said Ryan risks looking out of touch with the Republican base.

GOP strategist Ford O’Connell, who advised McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said Ryan was “downright stupid” to abandon Trump in such a public way.

“It’s Trump’s party for now, and he’s the standard bearer, he’s generating all the enthusiasm, and not supporting him could suppress turnout on the GOP side,” O’Connell said.

Read more from Jack Encarnacao at the Boston Herald

When House Speaker Paul Ryan told fellow House Republicans that he would no longer campaign with or defend GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, he may have felt it was the obvious, principled position to take.

Ryan’s goal in distancing himself from Trump, he told House GOP lawmakers on a conference call Monday, was to focus on saving the GOP majority in the House, potentially imperiled by Trump’s decline in polls. But Ryan’s new posture may already have backfired. Some fellow GOP House members are furious. And national party chairman Reince Priebus pointedly has not abandoned Trump, pledging to keep spending party money on the nominee’s campaign.

Priebus is playing it smart, says Republican strategist Ford O’Connell.

“At the end of day, this is Trump’s party, he’s the standard-bearer, he’s the one generating the enthusiasm,” says Mr. O’Connell, chair of Civic Forum political action committee. “So the better he does in your state, the better off you are.”

“Split-ticket voting beyond 10 percent statewide is literally a myth,” says O’Connell.

The party is in civil war, and what everyone seems to forget is this: Parties are not ideological machines,” says O’Connell. “They are competing enterprises designed to win elections. Sometimes you have to recognize that, even if it’s not your cup of tea. The Democrats get that.” 

Read more from Linda Feldmann at The Christian Science Monitor

Vulnerable California Republicans in Congress felt the Earth shift under them Monday as House Speaker Paul Ryan publicly cut his members loose from any obligation of loyalty to the top of the GOP ticket.

With the Republican Party reeling from the crisis less than a month before election day, three California Republicans considered most at risk of losing their seats denounced Trump after the emergence of the tapes on Friday. Others in safer seats stayed silent.

GOP analyst Ford O’Connell said Republican incumbents as a whole face a political quandary. Disloyalty to the nominee threatens to anger Trump’s hard-core loyalists at the party’s base who loathe its “establishment” leaders. Yet support for Trump could alienate the large swathes of general election voters, especially women and minorities, who view Trump with revulsion.

“At least until election day, this is still Donald Trump’s party,” O’Connell said. “Turning against the nominee could cause problems with base voters.”

O’Connell predicted Republicans would narrowly maintain House control, if only because Democrats would have to win nearly every vulnerable seat to reach 30. 

“It’s still a long haul for Democrats, but then again, we don't know what else could drop,” O’Connell said.

Read more from Carolyn Lockheed at The San Francisco Chronicle

House Republicans were counting on their own agenda to help put some distance between themselves and Donald Trump, but their six-plank plan, which Speaker Paul D. Ryan and fellow leaders released last month with great fanfare inside the Beltway, has landed with a thud elsewhere.

The lack of impact so far for the House Republican agenda is a challenge for Mr. Ryan and his troops, who are hoping their plans outlining an Obamacare replacement, calling for repairing the tax code and proposing limits on government regulations will give them campaign platforms.

Mr. Ryan made a pitch for the agenda in his address to the convention Tuesday, saying Republican Donald Trumpwould be more likely to sign their plans into law than would Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“The Donald doesn’t like to tether himself to the ideas of others,” said Ford O’Connell, a Republican Party strategist.

Read more from Tom Howell Jr. at The Washington Times

Republicans on Friday were cringing at the thought of a Republican National Convention in July in which the chair of the event, House Speaker Paul Ryan, refuses to back his own party's nominee, Donald Trump.

"It's not going to look good when the guy who is waiving the gavel is like, 'Screw you!'" one top GOP strategist predicted.

And that's why Republicans believe Ryan will ultimately throw his support behind Trump's probable nomination. Not because he wants to, but because he must.

"I do think Ryan can be won over," Republican strategist Ford O'Connell, who worked on the McCain-Palin presidential campaign in 2008.

O'Connell believes Trump privately wants to establish a positive relationship with Ryan so he is able to win over conservatives and unify the party behind his campaign before the July convention in Cleveland.

"The next ten weeks are the most important ten weeks of the general election," O'Connell said. "From now until the convention he has to unify the party behind him."

As for Ryan, his goal is to keep a Democrat out of the White House, and make sure nothing erodes his majority in the House.

"If he is out there looking like he's really having thoughtful discussions with Trump, it's a lot easier when he makes an endorsement and has to drag Republican conference members along with him," O'Connell said.

Read more from Susan Ferrechio at The Washington Examiner

As presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan took small steps toward mending their rift Friday, other prominent members of the GOP remained loudly resistant to Trump.

Ryan had sent tremors through the political world Thursdaywhen the top-ranking Republican told CNN he was "not ready" to endorse Trump, who solidified his grasp on the party's nomination with his victory in the Indiana primary on Tuesday.

According to Republican strategist Ford O'Connell, some Trump critics are genuine in their conviction that he should not be president, but the real concern for many is that they do not believe he can beat Hillary Clinton.

"You want to know where most of Donald Trump's problems will go away is if he can show himself to be competitive with Hillary Clinton in the general election," he said.

"A lot of them can be won over if they think that Trump can win...They understand the stakes of the election, whether or not they want to admit it," O'Connell said.

O'Connell said Ryan's public hesitation to back Trump is not surprising, but he also speculated that it was partly a bit of political theater.

Read more from Stephen Loiaconi at Sinclair Broadcast Group