DOUG MCKELWAY (GUEST HOST): Well, the highly anticipated meeting between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan on the House side, Donald Trump and Mitch Mcconnell on the Senate side has now finally happened. And despite widespread speculation that it might further expose the cavernous divide which now marks the GOP, it had quite the opposite effect, many are saying. Let's bring in our panel right now, Charles Lane, opinion writer for The Washington Post, Mercedes Schlapp of U.S. News & World Report, and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. Charles, observations?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well, I'm not among the many who thought it smoothed over the divide. Yes of course it did rhetorically. But whenever you talk about a process, what you mean is we did not conclude peace. We had a peace process in the Middle East for 50 years. The reason that you have it to give the appearance that something is happening, but you know there’s never going to be an end point. Now, here there will be an end point, there will be a point at which Ryan will give a perfunctory endorsement and then people will ignore him until November. But the fact that they came out of this with a joint statement that said we remain confident there is a great opportunity to unify the party, well the meeting was supposed to do something that would unify the party, to declare that an opportunity exists, is what we already knew. This is a sham marriage and the reason is simple, goodwill on both sides, but Paul Ryan is a conservative, has been all his life and committed to certain conservative principles. Trump has made it clear he's not a conservative. He's a nationalist populist, there are a lot of arguments in favor of that, but it isn't conservatism as he himself stressed, when he said that the Republican Party is not called the conservative party. Those are differences you never bridge. By making this a process, and dragging it out, what Ryan has done is to prolong his independence and to be the shelter and the locus of what's left of conservatism in the party.
