After the release of the Access Hollywood tape, which featured the future president bragging to Billy Bush about how his celebrity entitled him to sexually assault women, Paul Ryan canceled a scheduled appearance with Donald Trump and announced he would not campaign on behalf of the Republican nominee. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump,” then-House Speaker Ryan reportedly told his party at the time. “Not now, not in the future.” Ryan probably assumed he wouldn’t need to defend Trump in the “future,” as the prevailing wisdom was that Hillary Clinton would send him back to the bowels of reality TV from whence he came. But it was still a notable disavowal even if, in true Ryan form, it made no move to rescind his tortured Trump endorsement.
Of course, Ryan would break his promise after Trump’s shock victory. The self-styled wonk would, again and again and again, defend the president, enable him, and respond to his daily outrages with feeble handwringing. But the Wisconsin Republican is now trying to rehabilitate his doormat reputation. In a new book, portions of which were reported by the Washington Post on Thursday, Ryan tees off on the president, depicting him as a narcissistic, divisive loon and “uneducated about the government”—revelations that only further highlight how Ryan was knowingly complicit in Trump’s nightmare government.
“We’ve gotten so numbed by it all,” Ryan tells Tim Alberta in American Carnage, which examines how Republicans came to embrace Trump after an acrimonious 2016 race. “Not in government, but where we live our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example.”
Ryan, who tells Alberta that he viewed his retirement as an “escape hatch” to get away from Trump, plays up the “adults in the room” myth, suggesting his deference allowed him to steer Trump on a better course. “I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan recalls. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government…I wanted to scold him all the time. Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time,” Ryan continues. “We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was. Now I think he’s making some of these knee-jerk reactions.”
It’s a line Ryan has echoed before. “I can look myself in the mirror at the end of the day and say I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy, I avoided that tragedy. I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal, I advanced this goal,” he told the New York Times in a lengthy exit interview last August. And of course, it’s intended to paint Ryan in the best possible light, similar to John Kelly, Rex Tillerson, and others who suggested they only stood by Trump out of some high-minded sense of duty to the country. Of course, none actually succeeded in serving as a real moderating influence. They may be better than the sycophants he’s surrounded himself with now, but Kelly, Tillerson, and Ryan consistently failed to keep the president’s impulses in check. Worse, they lent a veneer of normalcy to a president who was decidedly not. Ryan makes clear in Alberta’s book that he knew Trump to be an unqualified jackass. In one anecdote, the House Speaker receives an early-morning phone call from then-chief of staff Reince Priebus asking him to read a tweet the president had just fired off.
“Terrible!” Trump wrote. “Just found out that [Barack Obama] had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!”
The tweet, offered without proof or basis in reality, sent Ryan into “maniacal, punch-drunk laughter,” according to Alberta. This behind-the-scenes Ryan hardly squares with the public Ryan, who repeatedly came to the president’s defense and downplayed his maddening Twitter addiction. “I actually don't pay that much attention to it,” Ryan once said of the president’s incessant shitposting.
That Ryan is now back to bashing Trump is, perhaps, a step above some of his former colleagues, who have turned into rabid, mindless supporters of the president. But it’s hardly courageous to point out Trump’s plainly obvious defects after the fact. So far, just one Republican—Justin Amash, who left the party earlier this month—has openly criticized the president. “These guys have all convinced themselves that to be successful and keep their jobs, they need to stand by Trump,” Amash tells Alberta in the book. “But Trump won’t stand with them as soon as he doesn’t need them. He’s not loyal. They’re very loyal to Trump, but the second he thinks it’s to his advantage to throw someone under the bus, he’ll be happy to do it.”
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