House Speaker Paul Ryan said Tuesday that his meeting with presumptive nominee Donald Trump will focus on "how to unify the Republican Party" to take back the White House in November.
"We shouldn't just pretend that our party is unified when we know that it is not," the Wisconsin congressman told Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal in an interview broadcast live by the newspaper and Facebook. "It's been one week since the Republican primary effectively ended.
"It's been a bitter and divisive primary," he added. "It's going to take more than one week just to repair and unify this party."
The interview begins at the 8:50 mark of the video above.
Ryan and Trump will meet Thursday, he told Seib. The speaker declined to discuss specifically what they planned to discuss, however.
"I don't want to negotiate or have a conversation with somebody through the media," he said. "I want to have a conversation with them one on one."
Seib is the Journal's Washington bureau chief. He interviewed Ryan in his Capitol Hill office.
"Donald Trump deserves a lot of credit for winning the primary, for bringing millions of people into the primary," Ryan said. "The question now is how we can unify all the various wings of the Republican Party — stitch them together — so that we're all rolling in the same boat, in the same direction.
"That's the kind of conversation that we need to begin having."
Meanwhile, Trump said this on Twitter: