Accused of kowtowing and spinelessness, the retiring House Speaker insists his conscience is clean knowing that things could have been worse—much worse.
Paul Ryan talks to reporters following a GOP strategy session on Capitol Hill.
Paul Ryan’s roast of Donald Trump at last fall’s AI Smith dinner in New York may be the closest the Speaker has ever come to admitting his true feelings about the president. “Every morning, I wake up in my office and scroll Twitter to see which tweets I will have to pretend that I didn’t see later,” he told the audience. The remark was intended as a joke, but it hit uncomfortably close to home: Ryan seems visibly uncomfortable when asked to respond to the president’s positions or remarks, historically brushing aside questions with a trademark lipless grimace plastered to his face. Technically speaking, the guy ought to be happier: thanks to Trump, some of his lifelong policy goals have finally become reality. But as Speaker of the House, not to mention one of several Republicans who repeatedly scuttled away from Trump during the election, Ryan’s Faustian bargain with a president so bent on corroding the traditional values of the Republican Party—not to mention purging it of all dissenters—has seemed especially egregious.
Though he insists otherwise, Ryan’s hot-and-cold relationship with Trump—one full of half-hearted wrist slaps and the occasional public ring-kissing—certainly seemed like one of the key reasons for his abrupt announcement this spring that he would retire as Speaker, just months before a contentious midterm that could very well see Republicans lose the House. But unlike other conservatives who bailed from public life and burned their bridges (see: Arizona’s Jeff Flake), Ryan claims he does not regret his choice to placate the president. In a lengthy exit interview with Mark Leibovich in The New York Times, the Janesville, Wisconsin, retiree frequently insists that refraining from criticizing the president was, in fact, the best way to handle him, if the goal was to prevent chaos and destruction.
A cynic might suggest that Ryan is attempting to salvage his own legacy by employing the logic of the quote-unquote “Committee to Save America”—moderate Trump advisers like Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, and H.R. McMaster, who reportedly justified their time in Trump’s employ as a civic duty to protect the country against Trump’s baser instincts. Yet even their best efforts could not prevent cataclysms like a global trade war—the economic nightmare that allegedly kept Cohn from quitting—or the president’s chummy relationship with Vladimir Putin, something Rex Tillerson attempted to curb before he was fired via tweet.
Of course, it is hard to know what tragedies Ryan might be alluding to. We do know that Trump ignored Ryan’s pointers on everything from budgets to F.B.I. investigations, even as the Speaker hesitated to strongly condemn Trump for condoning white supremacists in Charlottesville. Ryan shrugged when asked whether he could stop Trump from slapping tariffs on other countries. Perhaps he was saving his political capital for the real calamities just out of sight.
Ryan knows his critics’ argument well. But his assertions to Leibovich—specifically that standing up to Trump would have done more harm than good—cast his subservience in a new light. Ryan is probably onto something, even if it’s somewhat pathetic. He was already loathed by Trump’s base, who gleefully trashed him when he failed to enact parts of Trump’s agenda, and cheered his retirement as a victory over the swamp. If Ryan had decided to smash the glass and pull the fire alarm on Trump, it’s not clear that anyone would have listened—at least not in isolation. Even John McCain, the widely respected war hero and elder Republican statesman, failed to attract allies in his resistance to Trump’s agenda. Ryan decided to prioritize power over self-respect.
It’s possible that Ryan is exaggerating to embellish his own image—that, like the departed Cohn, Powell, and McMaster before him, he simply failed to keep the president in check, and gave up trying; after all, Trump was willing enough to move the needle on Ryan’s pet projects. But it’s also possible that Ryan is telling the truth: that he concluded, given the circumstances, that his resistance would be useless. If that’s the case, it’s worth pondering what Trump—who has already threatened nuclear war with North Korea, debased himself in front of Putin, and alienated various American allies—would do if allowed to indulge his natural aptitude for calamity. And how far the rest of the Republican Party would allow him to go before finding their voice.