DonaldTrump’s Hill supporters say GOP leaders are wasting their time. If Paul Ryan is trying to change the subject from Trump, it’s a lost cause according to them. | AP Photo Ryan's GOP tries to create Trump-free alternate reality 'It’s hard for us to get attention when we’re competing with Donald Trump,' one Republican lawmaker says of his leaders' efforts.

The day after Donald Trump leapfrogged toward the GOP nomination, this was how top House Republicans spent their Wednesday: Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy hosted a technology summit where he touted the passage of the first email privacy bill since “Top Gun” hit theaters in 1986, and Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks boasted of teaching her Hill colleagues how to use Snapchat.

Paul Ryan, meanwhile, headed to Georgetown to try and persuade graduating seniors that they should make the GOP – the one on the verge of making Trump its nominee – their party. The speaker also huddled with rank-and-file Republicans in the Capitol basement to talk up his legislative agenda.


“Take advantage of the work we’re doing this week,” Ryan told them. “If we don’t tell this story, no one will."

House leaders are effectively trying to create an alternate political universe in which Trump is relegated to an afterthought. Forget about delegate counts or a possible floor fight in Cleveland. The focus on Capitol Hill is on crafting an agenda — one that, to be sure, won’t become law — to try and project a competing, more substantive face of the Republican party.

A face, in other words, that looks nothing like Trump's.

Most House Republicans will concede in a private moment that the presidential election is all but lost for them. The prevailing expectation is that their party will lose the White House and the Senate, and probably and see their House majority trimmed by 10 to 15 seats.

That's why they overwhelmingly welcome Ryan’s efforts to talk about something besides the brawl between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), even if lawmakers snicker about Ryan’s repetitive tone and glossy videos. Even McCarthy, Ryan’s No. 2, joked earlier this week that talking about his “innovation initiative” was making journalists’ eyes glaze over.

“It’s hard for us to get attention when we’re competing with Donald Trump,” said Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Charlie Dent. “What Ryan and McCarthy are trying to do is establish an agenda for the House, and I think that is important given the challenge we’re facing in the presidential election, which sucks up all the oxygen,”

Trump’s Hill supporters say GOP leaders are wasting their time. If Ryan is trying to change the subject from Trump, it’s a lost cause.

“If they’re doing this just because they think this is a way to take away from…Donald Trump, I will call them out publicly and take them on from the floor,” said Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), a Trump backer. “No matter what the establishment, the old guard, the leadership has tried to do, it has not worked so far. This is a revolution.”

Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.), another Trump supporter, said, "The people have been speaking loudly over the past several months, and they're rejecting the establishment... If [top Congressional Republicans] can't see the writing on the wall — that there is a real movement in the country, not only the Republican side, but on the Democratic side — they are out of touch with their constituents."

The alternate GOP track offers a buffer on the other side as well: Democrats on both sides of the Capitol have been using their podiums in recent weeks to blast the GOP every chance they get for failing to act on what they consider urgent national emergencies. They’re harping on the lack of House action on everything from the Zika virus to the now-stalled Puerto Rico rescue package aimed at saving the territory from bankruptcy.

“I’m sick of dealing with Republicans who sit on their hands and do nothing,” DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said at a press conference Wednesday.

“I would like to call them feckless, but to say that, they would have had to make an effort to do something, but they haven’t. They’ve done nothing,” added Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.).

On Wednesday, House Republicans’ extracurricular activities gave them a way to focus on something different.

Ryan opened his pitch to Georgetown students telling a personal story about his father dying when he was 16, and his mother using Social Security benefits to support the family while she took college courses then started a small business. The speaker rapped on Bernie Sanders for offering free college without a plan to pay for it, knocked Obamacare for rising health care costs and slammed federal anti-poverty programs for failing to end hunger.

“That is why Republicans are working on a policy agenda right now… We owe the country an alternative,” he told the campus crowd. “Government is not supposed to manage people but to serve them.”

Earlier on the Hill, McCarthy and chief deputy whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) sat adjacent to a group of technology executives to talk about how innovation in the federal government could boost small businesses.

“It’s almost like Congress is back in time… and what the innovation initiative is all about is changing the mindset of government” to look ahead at what “the next 50 years will look like,” McCarthy explained.

Brooks talked about the need to prepare the workforce for technological change. She used herself as an example, detailing her effort to learn Snapchat to adapt to change in political communication. She highlighted her Snapchat skills on a big screen behind the Capitol Visitor Center stage, scribbling “cool GOP” in red ink over photos she snapped and posted.

Even supporters of the efforts to create a parallel narrative see issues. Dent said he wished the House would focus first on “fundamentals” like a budget and appropriations bills — two issues Ryan has been and will continue to struggle with because of resistance from conservatives. He couldn’t get a budget passed earlier this year, and now many question how he’ll get any appropriations bills across the finish line in the coming months.

“We can operate on parallel paths, but I am concerned about one path, which is the basic fundamentals,” Dent said. “I would rather us be in a better place on budget and the appropriations process… We have to get those down before we take on some of those tough issues in the Ryan agenda.”

