Former House Speaker Paul Ryan says he won't attend the 2024 Republican National Convention if Trump is the party's presidential nominee: 'I'm not interested in participating in that'

• Paul Ryan said he won't attend the RNC in 2024 if Donald Trump is the party's presidential nominee.
• Ryan told WISN-TV that he the convention being held in his home state didn't affect his decision.
• The ex-speaker has brought up Trump's poor standing with suburban voters in pushing for a new nominee.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan in a recent interview said he won't attend the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee if former President Donald Trump earns the party's nomination.

Ryan, who represented a southeastern Wisconsin-anchored congressional district from 1999 to 2019 and served as speaker from 2015 to 2019, worked with Trump to pass the Republican-authored Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017.

But since leaving office, Ryan has strongly opposed Trump seeking a return to the Oval Office, having become convinced that the former president cannot win the presidency for the Republican Party in a general election.

While speaking with WISN-TV, a Milwaukee-area ABC affiliate, Ryan said he would attend the convention if the GOP selected a new candidate to become the standard bearer for the party.

"It depends on who the nominee is. I'll be here if it's someone not named Trump," the former lawmaker said. 

When Ryan was asked if he'd ditch a convention with Trump as the nominee, even though the event will be held in his home state, he remained firm in his position.

"I'm not interested in participating in that, no. Even in Wisconsin," he said.

In the 2022 book, "Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission," written by journalist Mark Leibovich, Ryan revealed that he was "very comfortable" with the decisions he made regarding Trump while still in office.

The former speaker dismissed critics who wanted him to be more vocal in rebuking Trump's behavior, something that most Republican lawmakers generally shied away from during the then-president's tenure in office.

Ryan posed the question of whether some people would have preferred that he went after Trump every time the then-president made a controversial comment.

"I think some people would like me to start a civil war in our party and achieve nothing," Ryan told Leibovich.

During an October 2022 interview on the Fox Business Network, Ryan reiterated his opposition to a third Trump White House campaign.

"I think anybody not named Trump, I think is so much more likely to win the White House for us. We know we're so much more likely to lose with Trump because of the fact that he is not popular with suburban voters that we're going to want to win," he said at the time.

Ryan further amplified his message last week, calling Trump a "proven loser" while speaking with The Washington Post.

"I guess in some places we're just going to keep recording losses until we learn the lesson," the ex-speaker told the newspaper. "I'm hopeful that for the presidency, we'll learn the lesson in time for 2024."

While Trump narrowly won Wisconsin against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, now-President Joe Biden flipped the state back into the Democratic column in 2020.

However, Biden only won Wisconsin by roughly 20,000 votes out of nearly 3.3 million ballots cast, and the swing state is expected to once again be one of the most hotly-contested electoral prizes next year.