Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), the founding chairman of the House Freedom Caucus who President Donald Trump says is a “warrior,” plans to enter the House Speaker’s race to succeed outgoing Speaker Paul Ryan, he confirmed in an exclusive interview on The Curt Schilling Podcast on Breitbart News on Monday.

“If and when there is a Speaker’s race, I plan on being part of that discussion,” Jordan told Schilling in the exclusive interview.

“Right now, the most important thing is we do what we said,” Jordan added. “We get the right kind of immigration bill across the finish line. We actually make the tax cuts permanent. We fight for the values we told the American people [we would]. We reform welfare. I mean, these are the kind of things we told the American people we were going to do, and, I think, more important than who the speaker is next year is what we do this year because if we don’t do the right things this year, we might not have a race for speaker. Maybe it would be a race for minority leader, so let’s stay focused on what we got to do, and everything else will take that step.”

The race to replace Ryan as Speaker–whether it happens on Ryan’s schedule at the end of this Congress or if it happens sooner–is surely going to be a battle for the heart and soul of the new Republican Party. Ryan has carried on the leadership style of ousted former House Speaker John Boehner, while every candidate for the Speakership in Ryan’s wake will instead make populist appeals to the working-class party of Trump. For instance, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has appeared with Trump at campaign rallies most recently in the Iron Range of Minnesota in Duluth — a working-class neighborhood — while writing an op-ed for Breitbart News on how to reign in Silicon Valley’s “Masters of the Universe.” Majority Whip Steve Scalise has aimed to appear lockstep with the president on immigration. And Jordan is now announcing his plans for a speakership bid with Schilling.

While Jordan is not pushing for an immediate ouster of Ryan which would trigger a Speakership election before the midterm elections, Ryan is under increasing scrutiny over his repeated instances — the latest of which is immigration — where he is crosswise with the president and his agenda.

“The same bunch of folks–whether it’s establishment Democrats, establishment Republicans, the Koch Brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Goldman Sachs, Wall Street the Fortune 500, all of them–want open borders,” Billy Bova, a Trumpocrat, said on Breitbart News Saturday this weekend. Efforts of Trumpocrats like Bova to convince the working class in Rust Belt states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to vote for Trump in 2016 were critical to the president’s election. “They’re globalists and they want open borders in the United States. They want anybody to be able to come in that wants to come in and work for cheap wages, for little to nothing. It’s a race to the bottom.”

Bova said Ryan is “like a leech.”

“The guy has been sucking out of the public trough and sucking our blood for decades up in D.C. and doing the bidding of his establishment masters–the globalists and the corporatists and the open borders folks and the race-to-the-bottom American wage folks–to drive down wages,” Bova said, adding of Ryan: “The guy is just slippery and slimy and apparently has no core belief system other than the belief system for he and the people he does the bidding for and their pocketbooks. I’d like to have seen him gone years ago. I’d like to have seen Nancy Pelosi gone decades ago. A lot of those folks needed to have been gone a long time ago.”

LISTEN TO BILLY BOVA ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY:

Sam Nunberg, a former adviser to President Trump for several years including in the early months of his historic presidential campaign, says Ryan and his friend from Wisconsin — now former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus — “were responsible for about 35 percent of the slow start that the president got off on.”

“Remember: Paul Ryan had advised the president and basically convinced the president that he had it taken care of, but [Ryan argued] that the president had to repeal Obamacare under Paul Ryan’s formula and regime in order to then pass the tax cut — which was nonsensical and he didn’t have to do it at all,” Nunberg said on Breitbart News Saturday.

“Paul Ryan failed,” Nunberg added. “[Trump] left [Ryan] to his own devices up there and essentially gets a program that is written by the insurance lobby. Now, we get to here and Paul Ryan who’s retiring and is thinking about all the money he’s going to make as he heads into the private sector and I think he wanted one last gasp at trying to pass amnesty. With that said, it would have been devastating for the Republican Party but more importantly than the Republicans in Congress it would have been devastating for our president had we listened to Paul Ryan and the establishment and negotiated amnesty or so-called ‘comprehensive immigration reform’ for the next four months until the midterms. These midterms have to be a referendum on Donald Trump, which they are–good. And they need to be a referendum on the economy, on prosperity, on national security, and on law enforcement. We need to be able to get enthusiasm out to make sure that our voters come out because they have to understand that if we lose the majority in Congress and specifically in the House, the president is going to be bogged down with impeachment. This all led to that. Paul Ryan is a political nitwit. He has no place. I don’t know why he was named Speaker. He’s lived a very charmed life.”

Nunberg said Ryan is so “pathetic” he got “destroyed” in 2012 as the GOP vice presidential nominee by then Vice President Joe Biden in a debate. “That was one of the worst debate performances I’ve ever seen, it was abysmal,” Nunberg said. “I say good riddance to him. I also don’t understand why, after this, he should even be Speaker anymore.” He added that he “100 percent” thinks Republicans need to remove Ryan now as Speaker, by force if necessary, because he says “Paul Ryan hurts voter enthusiasm for our base.”

“Paul Ryan as Speaker will stop getting Republicans out in the states we need them out in in places up for grabs like California and New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,” Nunberg said. “We have very slim margins there. Some of these districts Hillary Clinton won. And these are urban districts as well. Paul Ryan is part of the problem. Paul Ryan, you know, he’s a lame duck. The voter doesn’t even know who’s going to be the next speaker. We might as well litigate this issue now. And further, Ryan has shown recently, just now with this immigration travesty that he has no political acumen nor does he frankly even care if the Republicans keep the majority because he’s not going to be speaker.”

LISTEN TO SAM NUNBERG ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY:

