Just days after Donald Trump announced his third bid for the White House, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan on Sunday denounced the former president, calling himself a "Never-Again-Trumper."
"I'm proud of the accomplishments [during the Trump administration] -- of the tax reform, the deregulation and criminal justice reform -- I'm really excited about the judges we got on the bench, not just the Supreme Court, but throughout the judiciary," Ryan told ABC News' Jonathan Karl in an interview. "But I am a Never-Again-Trumper. Why? Because I want to win, and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in '18, in '20 and now in 2022."
Ryan said Trump was directly to blame for the fact that, while Republicans secured the House with a razor-thin majority, they failed to flip the Senate.
"I personally think the evidence is really clear," Ryan said. "The biggest factor was the Trump factor … I think we would have won places like Arizona, places like Pennsylvania, New Hampshire had we had a typical, traditional conservative Republican, not a Trump Republican."
"We lost the House in '18," Ryan continued. "We lost the presidency in '20. We lost the Senate in '20. And now in 2022 we should have and could have won the Senate. We didn't. And we have a much lower majority in the House because of that Trump factor."
"He can get his people through the primaries, but they can't win general elections," Ryan said. "We get past Trump, we start winning elections. We stick with Trump, we keep losing elections. That's just how I see it."
He also asserted that if Trump is once again the GOP nominee for president, "We [will] probably likely lose the White House.”
Ryan, who stepped down as House Speaker in April of 2019, clashed with then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump when he ran for President. He initially said he was not “ready to support” Trump as the Republican presidential candidate, before ultimately endorsing him.
He was still critical of Trump at times, notably distancing himself from Trump after leaked video tapes surfaced, showing him making graphic comments about women.