When he was Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, Paul Ryan was one of the few reasons why convinced, passionate conservatives decided to vote for the Republican ticket in the presidential elections. Sure, the reasoning went, Romney wasn’t to be trusted, but Ryan? He was a real conservative. Someone we could all count on.
Well, from the looks of it, we were sadly mistaken. Ryan was just as much a Swamp Creature as all the other fake conservatives of the Republican establishment:
The author of an upcoming book highlighting how Republicans have dealt with the rise of President Trump says that former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), an early critic of Trump’s who ultimately fell mostly in line with the president, saw his retirement from Congress as an “escape hatch,” according to excerpts obtained by The Washington Post ahead of its release next week.
“I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan said, according to Tim Alberta’s book “American Carnage.”
“Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government … I wanted to scold him all the time.”
Really, Paul? Did you ever stop to think that this may actually have been the reason he won? That American voters didn’t want politics as usual? That they were hungry for a different kind of leader, someone who wasn’t a member of the entrenched political elite, but who would come in as an outsider and stir things up a bit?
The quotes above are bad enough, but wait, there’s more. Ryan also told the author of the book — American Carnage — that those around Trump “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,” he went on to say. “Now I think he’s making some of these knee-jerk reactions.”
The level of stupidity is hard to describe. First of all, if what he says is true, he and his colleagues were enabling a lunatic — after all, that’s the picture Ryan’s trying to paint here.
And secondly, did Ryan ever actually read Trump’s Twitter feed? Or keep tabs on his decisions? Trump’s tweets and decisions haven’t changed one bit. The Trump of 2016, 2017 and 2018 is the same as the Trump of 2019. If anything, you could actually argue that he has calmed down a bit.
Although the former congressman undoubtedly thinks that these statements will influence our opinion of Trump, he’s sadly mistaken. It only has an impact on our opinion of Ryan himself. After all, it’s now clear that the “conservative standard-bearer” of olden days is actually a cynical, opportunistic backstabber, who’s willing to turn on his erstwhile allies now that he’s out of politics.
As Trump would undoubtedly say: what a loser!
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