Paul Ryan knows he’s in a squeeze.

The Wisconsin Republican has spent two decades building a brand as a serious conservative with a friendly demeanor, who totes budget charts to town halls and is more prone to a back slap than a back stab.


But in the last year, Donald Trump has seized control of the Republican Party, throwing verbal daggers in every direction, and offering little in terms of policy specifics as he waltzed through the GOP presidential primary.

They aren’t speaking different languages. They are from different planets. Ryan has never had a job outside of Washington; Trump hasn’t ever worked in Washington.

But now Ryan is having to contend with a reality: Trump is the party’s nominee, and there is nothing he can do about it.

So here’s the House speaker’s play, according to multiple people in Ryan’s inner circle: he wants Trump to understand where he is coming from. Ryan wants to try to steer the party’s national political dialogue — as embodied by Trump's barbed rhetoric — in a better direction. He wants an open line of communication between his operation and Trump’s. He isn’t going to try to extract policy concessions from Trump — he understands they are unlikely to ever agree on trade or immigration — but he wants some recognition that Ryan has 247 members of the House that need to be re-elected, and they can’t do so while wincing through the general election in November.

It might work, it might not. Ryan could endorse Trump at some point — but there are no guarantees. His posture: at least I tried to make things work.

One thing is for certain: Ryan is almost certainly not going to endorse Trump after their big meeting on Thursday — he’s likely to say that the 9 a.m. confab at the Republican National Committee’s offices was just the beginning of the conversation. Might he endorse Trump at some point? Sure, according to sources in his inner circle, but it’s unlikely to ever be a full embrace. They simply disagree on too much with too much at stake. Ryan will focus on keeping his House majority intact, while Trump focuses on defeating Hillary Clinton.

All of these decisions are laced with peril for Ryan. If Ryan does endorse Trump, he could be seen as caving to the New York billionaire after months of deeming his rhetoric problematic and not emblematic of the Republican Party. A Ryan endorsement could disappoint the conservative intelligentsia, which has applauded Ryan's courage. In short, lining up with Trump is a major risk to Ryan’s brand.

But should he not endorse Trump, Ryan could be seen as a man who worsened a major rift within the Republican Party. He could alienate the grassroots, who helped rocket Trump to the top of the party.

“Paul doesn’t want to be an issue; we need to beat Hillary Clinton — that’s the issue here,” said South Carolina Rep. Mick Mulvaney, a leader in the House Freedom Caucus. “Any high ranking Republican — whether Paul Ryan, Reince Priebus or Jeb Bush — that says they’re not supporting nominee? They have some hard questions to answer about why they’re a Republican.”

There are two critical dynamics at play for Ryan in all of these decisions. Should he want another term as speaker of the House, he must keep in mind that he needs the support of 218 Republicans to keep the gavel. Hanging your party’s nominee out to dry is not the best show of unity.

And if he wants to run for president in 2020 — which many Republicans think he does — Ryan has to be careful to keep the base engaged, by not looking like he crosschecked Trump by starving him of an endorsement. If Ryan endorses Trump, he needs to make sure he does it in a way that doesn’t compromise his own political identity.

The difficulty for Ryan is that Trump, by his own admission, is incredibly malleable on policy. So the speaker has to appeal to Trump on a visceral level, and the real estate magnate has used identity politics and unpopular political strategy to fuel his ascent. Banning Muslims from the U.S. and playing footsie with white supremacists need to stop, Ryan has said publicly. But Trump has shown no willingness to temper that talk.

If the two can’t work things out and find a middle ground, Ryan earlier this week opened the door to making a graceful departure from the 2016 presidential convention scene altogether: He said he’d remove himself from chairing this summer's convention if Trump wants him to step down. Those comment followed a dramatic back and forth in which Ryan said last week he’s just not ready to support Trump — and Trump’s camp called into question whether he should really be speaker of the House.

Speaker Paul Ryan: We need a real 'unification' of the Republican party Speaker Paul Ryan on Donald Trump's nomination.

Now, of course, the pressure is building on both sides to put aside their differences and plot a path forward.

“The number of House members endorsing Trump are growing, and while there are those still holding out, I think everyone will come together — and it’s Paul’s responsibility to unify them,” said Rep. Tom Marino (R-Penn.) a Trump-backer. He’s holding out for an olive branch of some sort: “They’ll walk out of there — united.”

It’s sure to be an interesting week for Ryan’s House Republican Conference. Only a small slice of them will meet with Trump: Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.), Republican Conference Chairman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) will all have an audience with the party’s presumptive nominee. Ryan and McMorris Rodgers so far are the only members of that group who said they’re not ready to support Trump.

New York Rep. Peter King, who once mused he would become a newspaper reporter if Trump was the party’s nominee, said a deal can be struck that would orchestrate a peace between Ryan and Trump. He thinks if Trump can get behind the core principals of Ryan’s GOP agenda, then Ryan can get behind Trump.

“It depends logically on how reasonable Donald Trump wants to be,” King said of the pending kumbaya. “These are all first impressions for all of us. Donald Trump is Donald Trump. And we haven’t had a Speaker who is as philosophical as Paul Ryan.”