Prepare for the lionization of Paul Ryan
How will history remember those who enabled Donald Trump?
Master legislator. Wonky intellectual. All-American conservative. Congressional institutionalist, stuck between some rocks (his policy beliefs, his patriotism) and a couple of hard places (his president and his party). Yet through sheer force of will and wonkery — a “minor miracle,” the local paper called it — he navigated competing and unpredictable forces to pass America’s first major tax overhaul since 1986.
That’s what history is likely to say about House speaker Paul Ryan. That the legacy achievement of the “famously wonky” “solution-oriented fiscal conservative” is neither conservative nor fiscally responsible probably won’t matter.
That the debt-and-deficit-obsessed numbers guy only values the pretense of fiscal responsibility on the stump and only worries about debt and deficits under Democratic presidents probably won’t matter. (One Fox News contributor called Ryan’s 2012 convention speech “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”)
That the then-vice presidential candidate who proclaimed that “economic policy [is] my value-add” to the Mitt Romney campaign also said more recently, in a moment of honesty, that “nobody knows” whether his long-heralded tax cut will pay for itself — that small postscript probably won’t matter, either.
None of these inconsistencies will matter to Ryan’s legacy because, as The New Republic’s Alec MacGillis wrote in a profile of Ryan in 2012, “once you earn a reputation as a Serious Man in Washington, it’s almost impossible to lose it.”
For those appalled by Ryan’s duplicity and shamelessness, the persistence of his reputation as “a pillar of GOP competence and seriousness” is difficult enough to stomach. Ryan spent most of 2017 dissolving any last shreds of credibility as a “regular order” institutionalist by forcing through the House a desperate repeal of the Affordable Care Act and trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the wealthy. Both efforts came mostly free of the burdens of committee hearings, floor debate, or the possibility of amendments.
But it’s on the question of moral courage that Ryan’s behavior falls so grievously short of what his legacy will likely reflect. That shortfall raises a more profound question for American democracy: Will it matter that one of the few Republicans who truly had the chance to hold Donald Trump accountable not only declined to do so but chose, instead, to enable Trump’s rise to power?
The question of Paul Ryan’s legacy — and what it says about American political culture in the Trump era — arose following a December Politico story that reported the speaker planned to retire at the end of the 115th Congress. The article cited more than 30 interviews of people close to Ryan, among whom “not a single person believed Ryan [would] stay in Congress past 2018.”
Who knows what the speaker will actually do; any assessment of how history remembers him may be premature. But assuming Ryan leaves and Trump’s presidency eventually ends — ideally with a peaceful transfer of power to a democratically elected successor — one can only hope that America’s institutional memory will remember Ryan’s role in it.
When it comes to asking how and why someone as patently unfit for office became the president of the United States, reflecting on Ryan’s support for Trump is a good place to start. Throughout the 2016 general election, the speaker not only explicitly endorsed Trump but also allowed his own institutionalist stamp of approval to give not-quite-Never Trumpers permission to do the same under the obviously false pretext that “serious people” like Ryan would keep Trump in check. Wishful thinking, to put it charitably.
Since Trump’s election, everything Ryan has said and done seems to have been put through a carefully calibrated filter of whether it would bring him closer to passing an enormous, unpaid-for tax cut for rich Americans — what Politico described as “the things he had only fantasized about” before President Trump became a reality. It seems to have paid off: Ryan got his tax cut in exchange for, according to a “senior Trump aide” quoted in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, post-election support for the president that entailed “rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness.” Perhaps that’s why Ryan himself says he was “made for this moment.”
If history stamps that legacy with a grade exceeding clever opportunist who made America’s misfortune work for him, history will be giving Ryan too much credit. Millions of people have borne witness to Donald Trump’s unfitness for office, including some of his Republican colleagues in Congress. Yet only a select few have truly been in a position to act unilaterally to constrain it. In addition to its high profile, the speakership of the House of Representatives today comes with incredible power, from controlling the bills that come to the floor to determining committee assignments. Endowed with the privilege of that position, Paul Ryan, conservative institutionalist, has failed spectacularly to use any of the legislative branch’s powerful tools to check or balance the out-of-control executive.
Thus the more significant, and as-yet-unresolved question: Will the collective “we” hold accountable the Paul Ryans of the world who enabled Donald Trump? Will the legacies of those who could have stopped Trump’s rise to the White House reflect their willful failure to do so?
Many observers have said frequently, and somewhat wistfully, that history would judge those who put Trump in office. How Paul Ryan is remembered will give us a good idea whether that comforting thought is actually true, or just something we tell ourselves in fits of indignation and despair. History has a short memory, particularly in Congress. Consider that one of the Senate office buildings still bears the name of Georgia Democratic Senator Richard Russell, the staunch segregationist and relentless opponent of civil rights.
Paul Ryan may not have a building named after him, but it seems plausible that the odes to the speaker upon his retirement will read something like the recent editorial in Ryan’s hometown newspaper, which predicted that he would be heralded as an athlete at the top of his game, a man of “humanity and decency” who deserves praise for not “getting into a tweet war with Trump,” even though working with the president “must be exhausting.”
The United States is obsessed with punishment and finger-pointing. Maybe the healthiest step for reconciling and repairing our post-Trump democracy will be just to move forward in rebuilding institutions and restoring trust. But simply ignoring how and why Trump happened comes at a high cost, too.
The next time an aspiring demagogue — perhaps a more capable one — sets his sights on the White House and those standing in the way are presented with the same faustian bargain Ryan gleefully accepted, will Ryan’s tarnished reputation serve as a warning? Or will his legacy somehow skip the Trump chapter, suggesting that another generation of Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells can get away with trading values for political victories?
Ultimately, those questions will be answered by voters. In the meantime, whether it’s seven months or seven years from now, when Trump leaves office our collective responsibility will be to remember who made possible this crisis of American government. If a faithful record of history is to be written before the conventional wisdom takes hold, the first question to any sitting Republican member of Congress, starting with Paul Ryan, must be: Where were you? What did you do to constrain this man and those around him?
It’s never too early to lay the groundwork for an honest accounting of this chapter in American history. Those for whom moral leadership still means something should be prepared to challenge the inevitable lionization of Paul Ryan and combat the willful forgetfulness that will follow the Trump era.
