Paul Ryan was the last holdout.

By bowing to Donald Trump, the new power inside the Republican Party, the House speaker and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have consummated the marriage that the GOP establishment has resisted all year long. Their political fates are now formally hitched to the bombastic businessman, and they'll have to deal with the consequences.


Love, though, this is not.

Both men have made clear that their support for Trump has its limits and that Republican candidates will be advised, even encouraged, to run as far away from the presumptive nominee as they need to.

If Trump strays too far from mainstream GOP views, they'll call him out. And Trump’s attacks on fellow Republicans need to stop, McConnell advised in an interview with CNN on Thursday.

Overall, the two Republican leaders have shown they believe Trump is a better choice than Hillary Clinton — but not by much.

"It’s no secret that he and I have our differences," Ryan, the final member of Republican congressional leadership to give Trump his blessing, said in an op-ed in his hometown paper. "I won’t pretend otherwise. And when I feel the need to, I’ll continue to speak my mind. But the reality is, on the issues that make up our agenda, we have more common ground than disagreement."



“Once you've won, it's a time to bring the party together and be gracious. I don't agree with everything that Trump does or says but we have a choice, a choice between two very unpopular candidates. Very unpopular,” McConnell added.

“I don't think either one of these candidates are going to have the support of people ... like they did with Barack Obama in '08, [when] they gave him the big Senate majority and House majority, [and said] do whatever you want, Mr. President. I don't think that's going to be the case for Trump or Clinton," the Republican leader added.

Not exactly an emphatic endorsement.

On Thursday, Ryan ended weeks of drama over whether he would formally back Trump, the business mogul and reality TV star who has seized control of the GOP en route to his party's presidential nomination. Ryan’s nod came just as Clinton declared in a speech that it would be a "historic mistake" to elect Trump.

A source close to Ryan said the speaker's decision to endorse came after several private conversations between the two but wasn't made in consultation with Trump's campaign.

Yet even as Ryan threw his support to Trump, the Wisconsin Republican noted he still has reservations.

“It is my hope the campaign improves its tone as we go forward and it’s all a campaign we can be proud of,” Ryan told The Associated Press.

Ryan, the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee and close ally of never-Trump leader Mitt Romney, has been uncomfortable with some of Trump's most divisive policy declarations, including his call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States or the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants. As of late last week, Ryan refused to publicly back Trump, telling reporters that "nothing's changed my perspective."

Ryan, though, said that he was encouraged by his conversations with Trump about the policy platform the speaker plans to unveil in coming weeks, and about the list of potential Supreme Court nominees that Trump released last month.

"But the House policy agenda has been the main focus of our dialogue," Ryan said. "We’ve talked about the common ground this agenda can represent. We’ve discussed how the House can be a driver of policy ideas. We’ve talked about how important these reforms are to saving our country. And we’ve talked about how, by focusing on issues that unite Republicans, we can work together to heal the fissures developed through the primary."

Ryan added: "Through these conversations, I feel confident he would help us turn the ideas in this agenda into laws to help improve people’s lives. That’s why I’ll be voting for him this fall."

Paul Ryan embraces poll showing more Republicans trust Trump than him Paul Ryan talks about a new NBC poll during a press conference on Tuesday.

Ryan’s resistence to a Trump endorsement — whether driven by a “thoughtful review” of his positions or a more personal dislike of the candidate — was becoming a political problem. Not just for Ryan, but for House Republicans at large.

Ryan is slated to chair the GOP convention next month, and a feud with Trump would be a disaster for the Republican rank and file. Democrats and the media would harp on it endlessly; Ryan already faced multiple variations of the same questions during two news conferences last week: Why wasn’t he supporting Trump? What did it mean that he wasn’t backing the presumptive nominee?

The dyanamic between the two grabbed headlines after a bombshell interview that Ryan gave CNN early last month. The speaker said he was “not ready” to get behind Trump. Ryan said Trump needed to become a unifying figure for conservatives, with a campaign that Republicans would be “proud to support and proud to be a part of."

"And we've got a ways to go from here to there," Ryan said.

Tensions between the men quickly eased from there, even as Ryan still held back on an endorsement. A week later, they met at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington and declared in a joint statement afterward that while “we were honest about our few differences, we recognize that there are also many important areas of common ground,” adding that “we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal” of unity.

A top House GOP aide said the support for Trump from top Hill Republicans was “arm’s length, at best.”

“I can’t remember in my life — in politics, or business, or wherever — who has been as wildly undisciplined as Trump,” said the Republican aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “But it has still worked for him. So we’ll see what happens.”

Democrats, for their part, continue to mock the “tepid” support for Trump from Ryan, McConnell and other senior Republicans — despite the glaring rivalries within the Democratic Party, too.

“When he initially refused to endorse Trump four weeks ago, Paul Ryan said it was time to set aside bullying and belittlement,” said Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Ryan’s endorsement. “But with his tepid, halfhearted endorsement today, Ryan has backed away from his own criticisms of Trump’s dangerous, divisive campaign, bowed down, kissed the ring and conceded that Trump is the leader of the Republican Party."