WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are sitting down face-to-face for the first time, a week after Ryan stunned Republicans by refusing to back the mercurial billionaire for president.

The much-anticipated meeting opened Thursday morning as polls suggest Republican voters are getting behind Trump, who effectively clinched the nomination last week. GOP lawmakers are increasingly calling for the party to end its embarrassing bout of infighting and unite to beat likely Democratic nominee Hillary

Clinton in November, and many want to see Ryan get on board.

Trump entered the Republican National Committee building, the venue a few blocks from the Capitol, through a side door as about a dozen protesters who oppose his immigration positions demonstrated at the front, chanting “Down, down with deportation. Up, up with liberation.” They tried to deliver a cardboard coffin to the RNC representing the suffering of immigrants under GOP policies and what they say will be the death of the party under Trump. They were not allowed inside.

Before the meeting, Ryan insisted party unity was his goal.

“We come from different wings of the party,” he said Wednesday. “The goal here is to unify the various wings of the party around common principles, so that we can go forward to unify it.”

“I don’t really know him,” Ryan said of Trump, noting they’ve met only once, briefly, at a fundraiser in 2012 when Ryan was his party’s vice presidential nominee. “We just need to get to know each other.”

For his part Trump insisted defiantly that he doesn’t need the blessing of Ryan or other Republican leaders wary of the candidate.

“If we make a deal, that will be great,” Trump told Fox News Channel. “And if we don’t, we will trudge forward like I’ve been doing and winning all the time.”

The two men represent vastly different visions for the Republican Party, and whether they can come together may foretell whether the GOP will heal itself after a bruising primary season or face irrevocable rupture.

Trump, for years a registered Democrat, has offended women, Hispanics, and others while violating establishment party orthodoxy on numerous issues Ryan holds dear, from trade to wages to religious freedom. Ryan, a policy-focused conservative, insists the GOP must be a party of ideas, and has championed an agenda that has drawn Trump’s scorn by pushing cuts in Medicare and other government programs.

Indeed, a broader swath of Republican voters appears to be moving behind Trump, despite big-name holdouts such as Ryan, both former president Bushes and the party’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney.