Sessions: Ryan ‘needs to’ endorse Trump soon

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) is pushing Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to endorse Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s presumptive presidential nominee. 

“He needs to do that,” Sessions told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We don’t need to continue having the Speaker hanging out there, in my opinion.”

{mosads}Sessions also suggested that Ryan doesn’t read free trade agreements, according to the Washington Examiner, despite being a powerful advocate for such deals within the GOP.

“I know the Speaker believes in trade agreements, any of them,” Sessions said. “I don’t think he feels he has to read them; they’ve just got to be good. But I don’t agree with that and the American people have voted on that — they’ve spoken. Donald Trump has won and he is crystal clear on this issue: We are not going to have any trade agreements unless it protects the American interest.”

Ryan and Trump have had a cool, somewhat distrustful relationship throughout the primary. But many in the GOP — lawmakers, strategists and aides — are now convinced Ryan will endorse Trump before he’s officially nominated at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in mid-July. 

The Hill reported Saturday that GOP colleagues say Ryan wants concessions from Trump, such as toned-down rhetoric and a commitment to core conservative values.

Ryan has in the past condemned some of Trump’s more radical comments and policies, most notably deriding Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. as “unconstitutional.” But things turned downright frosty at the start of May, when Ryan declared on CNN that he wasn’t ready to back Trump, even though the political outsider had vanquished his 16 GOP rivals.

In recent weeks, however, there’s been a noticeable thaw. Ryan and Trump huddled at Republican National Committee headquarters earlier this month — their first formal sit-down — and they spoke again by phone this week in what Ryan called a “productive” conversation.