House Speaker Paul Ryan said he has talked with key White House staffers multiple times about the GOP health care bill. | Getty Ryan insists he and Trump are unified on Obamacare repeal

Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is “absolutely” on the same page as President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Wednesday morning, despite “those who would love to wedge us.”

Ryan’s promise that he and the White House are working well together comes one day after the far-right media outlet Breitbart News published audio of the speaker telling House Republicans during last year’s campaign that he would not “defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future.”


Those comments were widely reported when Ryan first made them, but the emergence of the audio as the two GOP leaders are working together to champion legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act resurfaced the awkward partnership during the campaign. Ryan said that bill was authored in conjunction with the Trump administration, specifically Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, as well as Republicans in the Senate.

“I’ve talked to [White House chief of staff Reince Priebus] and [chief strategist Steve Bannon] about this a number of times. We are all on the same page, I mean absolutely, with the president,” Ryan said of the health care legislation during an interview with conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. “The president is bringing members of our caucus down there saying, We need you to support this, we need you to support this.’ They’re making phone calls to our members saying, ‘This is the right way to go, this is what we want to do.’”

While the health care legislation has the support of the White House and Republican leadership in both chambers of Congress, some GOP members have been hesitant to fall in line. At least four Republican senators have said they cannot support the legislation because of its cuts to Medicaid, a concern echoed by some in the House.

And on the other end of the Republican spectrum, some in the GOP’s more conservative wing have said they oppose the legislation because it does not do enough to undo certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act. True to its conservative ideals, Breitbart News has been critical of the bill and labeled it “RyanCare,” derisively attaching the speaker’s name to the bill in the same way that Republicans pinned former President Barack Obama’s name to his signature health care legislation.

“We are on the same page with the White House. I think there are those who would love to wedge us for one reason or another, but that’s just not the case,” Ryan said. “We are on the same page. We laid out a plan for the president on how to achieve his legislative agenda in 2017.”