Lou Dobbs went after retired Republican House Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner on Monday night, bizarrely calling them out for not commenting on current Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) ripping up her copy of President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address last week.
“A stunning silence from two of the biggest RINO House speakers the country ever had,” the Fox Business host said on his show, using shorthand for the phrase “Republican in name only.”
“It’s a silence that’s raising more questions about both Ryan and Boehner than about actually the speaker herself,” Dobbs added.
Both Boehner, who served as the speaker from 2011 to 2015, and Ryan, who served from 2015 to 2019, have retired from elective politics. Boehner sits on the board of a cannabis company, and Ryan joined the board of directors at Fox Corporation last March.
Although neither man has indicated a break from the Republican Party, both have had their criticisms of the president.
Ryan has openly unleashed on Trump since his departure from office, and told Politico last year that he regretted acquiescing to the Trump administration before his retirement. Boehner, a longtime friend of the president, said in 2018 that the Republican Party he knew had been replaced by the “Trump Party.”
“The Republican Party is kind of taking a nap somewhere,” he said at the time.
Dobbs has also criticized other Republicans who haven’t shown unwavering support for the president.
He called Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) a RINO ― among other things ― after the senator voted last week to convict Trump of abuse of power in the Senate impeachment trial. Dobbs has also blasted John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser whose book manuscript says the president tied aid for Ukraine to an investigation into political rivals, as a “tool for the radical Dems and the deep state.”
Watch Dobbs unleash on the former House speakers in the video below, courtesy of Media Matters.