“Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time. 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.”
Thus former House Speaker Paul Ryan on Donald Trump, in Tim Alberta’s American Carnage, detailing Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Yes, you may have thought of Paulie as a lying, two-faced pretty boy with not an honest bone in his body—and you’d be right. In fact, Paulie was one of Trump’s biggest enablers, as another former Republican congressman, Mickey Edwards, wrote in the New York Times in 2017, under the snappy title “Stand Up, Paul Ryan, or Step Aside”, in which he had this to say about Ryan’s utter failure to maintain the co-equal status of the House of Representatives to the presidency assigned to it by the U.S. Constitution:
The toadiness of the legislative leadership, and the low regard in which it is held by the president’s entourage, have led to such previously unimaginable scenes as Stephen Bannon, a senior White House staff member, giving orders to members of Congress and demanding a copy of the leadership’s secret vote counts to create an enemies list for possible reprisals. Mr. Bannon should have been ordered to leave the Capitol.
Instead, of course, it was Ryan who left, joining the Board of Directors of Fox News. Recently, he was chosen by President Trump to head a delegation sent to Taiwan, something that probably won’t happen again. Ryan was Trump’s chiefest enabler, passing the notorious and disgusting “tax cut”, aka, the “billionaires delight”, which is Trump’s only tangible “achievement”, and which solidified the financial community’s previously “fluid” support for Trump, much to the country’s misfortune. If Ryan had actually insisted on his “principles”—which in fact he never had—his supposed devotion to “fiscal sanity”—the tax cut never would have passed, because it added about $100 billion to the deficit every year. Paulie then followed that up with a budget-bustin’ budget that kicked in with a similar overrun. Ryan spent the eight years of the Obama Administration decrying “wild spending” and then as Trump’s minion blew up the store. What a disgusting man.
