NEW YORK CITY, New York — Several days after House Speaker Paul Ryan failed in his latest attempt to undermine the Republican nominee for president Donald J. Trump’s chances of defeating Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Speaker has fallen back in line with the Trump campaign and has begun delivering the campaign’s core message for the day.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Ryan’s team issued a statement from the Speaker on the emails that surfaced via WikiLeaks showing the Hillary Clinton campaign’s spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri’s disdain for Catholics. Ryan said in the statement:
The Clinton campaign’s disdain for the Catholic faith and Christian evangelicals is staggering. Catholicism has been the catalyst for the creation of hospitals, orphanages, and much of the university system across the world. To disparage the Catholic Church as ‘severely backwards’ is an insult to millions of people across the nation. If anything, these statements reveal the Clinton campaign’s hostile attitude toward people of faith in general. This is the United States of America—for centuries, people fled to our shores to find refuge from religious persecution. All Americans of faith should take a long, hard look at this and decide if these are the values we want to be represented in our next president. If Hillary Clinton continues to employ people with biased and bigoted views, it’s clear where her priorities lie.
That statement falls in line with what the Trump campaign had pushed on a conference call with reporters earlier on Wednesday.
“The hostility to religious liberty and the beliefs that we hold as Catholics should not go unnoticed or unpunished,” Trump campaign manager KellyAnne Conway said on the call. “We call on Hillary Clinton to apologize and to fire the staff who have engaged in this vicious anti-Catholic bigotry. All of this shows who these people are at the core.”