Special: Paul Ryan endorses Trump, modest job growth in May and Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

GWEN IFILL: Hello, I’m Gwen Ifill, and welcome to the Washington Week Webcast Extra , where we pick up where we left off on the weekly broadcast.

Joining me around the table, John Harwood of CNBC and The New York Times , Peter Baker of The New York Times , and Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post .

This week we saw two long-awaited candidate endorsements, and both were of the lukewarm variety. California Governor Jerry Brown, who has had a long and fractious relationship with both Clintons, waited until a week before his state’s primary before endorsing Hillary, saying: “This is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other. The general election has already begun. Hillary Clinton, with her long experience, especially as secretary of state, has a firm grasp of the issues and will be prepared to lead our country on day one.” And even then, he praised Bernie Sanders.

And House Speaker Paul Ryan came around to the inevitability of Donald Trump, but it wasn’t exactly an embrace. Here’s how he put it in an interview with the Associated Press.

HOUSE SPEAKER PAUL RYAN (R-WI): (From video.) There’s no kind of an agreement of sorts. It was just needing to spend time with our presumptive nominee to get comfortable with the notion that he would be supportive of the direction we want to go as a party, as a country.

MS. IFILL: So, whether they are lukewarm or not, do these endorsements even matter anymore?

MS. TUMULTY: I think what was interesting, normally endorsements are about the endorser trying to help the endorsee. In this case, I think both of them – and particularly Ryan – was doing it for his own purposes. There’s a real institutional struggle about what the Republican Party stands for, and Paul Ryan wants it to be the congressional wing of that party that defines it. So he’s, you know, essentially realizing there’s only one guy left as the nominee, but if he wants to advance his ideas, he’s got to get this whole argument off the table.

MS. IFILL: Which is interesting, because that’s what – Jerry Brown doesn’t quite have the same situation, but I do remember – we all remember, in 1992, when he actually ran for president and took a real shot at Hillary Clinton, which made Bill Clinton not happy, and they have never been warm ever since. But I guess he was left in a situation where if he didn’t endorse, it would have been a bigger deal.

MS. TUMULTY: Right, and he’s – you know, he is governing California as, I think in many ways, much more of a moderate than he was back in those days. So I think he also represents more of the Clinton brand of Democratic politics than maybe he might have at an earlier phase in his life.

MS. IFILL: Which leaves it to the two candidates to really slug it out against each other. Let’s listen a little bit more to their back and forth from this week.

MRS. CLINTON: (From video.) Imagine if he had not just his Twitter account at his disposal when he’s angry, but America’s entire arsenal. Do we want him making those calls – someone thin-skinned and quick to anger, who lashes out at the smallest criticism? Do we want his finger anywhere near the button?

MR. TRUMP: (From video.) The only reason she’s behaving like this, and the only reason she’s been dragged so far left, believe me, is she doesn’t want to go to jail over the emails, OK? I have read so much about the emails. Folks, honestly, she’s guilty as hell.

MS. IFILL: Now, that’s not returning – what did Hillary say, that he responds to every little slight? And then he did it the very next day. So it sounds like that’s the – that’s the deal.

MR. HARWOOD: Well, look, he kind of proved her point with the tweets that he sent during her speech –

MS. IFILL: Even while she was speaking, that’s true.

MR. HARWOOD: – with the remarks that he made there, with the interview that he gave to The Wall Street Journal when he went after the Mexican – judge of Mexican heritage, which he said was an inherent conflict of interest. Each of them have material to work with. A lot of Americans don’t trust Hillary Clinton, so that is a line that we’re going to hear a lot from Donald Trump. But Hillary Clinton has a message that is pretty broad, saying this guy, you don’t just disagree with him or it’s not about his policies or even his tone, it’s about his entire fitness to serve in the White House. And I think we’re going to see her repeating that message over and over.

MS. IFILL: John, it’s the first part of the month and we got the jobs report again – some of it, as usual, good news and some of it bad news. It seems like, on balance, which was worse, the fact that – or better, the part – the unemployment rate dropped to under 5 percent, 4.7 percent, or that we still can’t seem to get any sustainability in people getting jobs?

MR. HARWOOD: It was a disappointing report. The fact that only 38,000 jobs were created reflects a slowdown from the pace we’ve had the last couple of years, which was well over 200,000 a month. So it’s not just this report, it’s recent reports. Some of that reflects the hangover from slowdown over the winter, slowdown in much of the rest of the world, China in particular. But no, this was not a good report, and the fall in the unemployment rate came largely because people left the labor force. So this – it was not surprising that Donald Trump quickly jumped on that as evidence of the ongoing “disaster,” as he calls it, of the Obama economy. But Hillary Clinton was making broader arguments this week.

MS. IFILL: Of course. Well, that’s what happens when the news is bad.

I’m going to tap into your historical knowledge of the American political system, Peter. This week, we saw that there’s a full Libertarian ticket prepared to appeal to the “never Trump” group that exists somewhere out there in the Republican Party. The Libertarian candidate for president is Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor. And the vice presidential candidate, in some ways kind of more interesting, is Bill Weld, the former Massachusetts governor, who was very, very insistent this week that he was glad and relieved to leave the Republican Party. So have we ever seen anything like this before, really, especially with a candidate for the main party who’s so –

MR. BAKER: It does seem like two, you know, former governors, people of great credibility at one point in their careers, now taking on this sort of marginal party’s leadership. Having said that, Gary Johnson has been running now for president for a while, first inside of the party and out, you know, on tickets of like marijuana legalization and so forth. He’s been a marginal figure. Bill Weld’s been out of pocket for a long time. He tried running for governor of New York –

MS. IFILL: That’s right.

MR. BAKER: – after leaving Massachusetts. So, you know, they’re not – they are not prominent figures lately, but they say something about the part of the party that’s disenchanted with Trump. I don’t know that they have much of an appeal beyond a small amount, but Ralph Nader didn’t have much more than 3 percent and he arguably made a big difference in 2000. And so we’ll see – we’ll see if it gets anywhere.

MS. IFILL: So if it’s really, really close, who knows?

MR. BAKER: Yeah, in particular states, you know. Does that make –

MS. IFILL: And this year I am so ready to be surprised about anything that happens next, honest to goodness.

Thank you all very much. Stay online all week long for the latest developments on these and other stories from the best reporters in Washington, our panelists. That’s, of course, at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek. And we’ll see you next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra .