Tony Alter
Speaker Paul Ryan was a fierce critic of Donald Trump, and it is stunning to see him now as chief enabler of the most dangerous and cruel presidency in American history.
During the campaign, the Republican Senator from Wisconsin squared off against Trump, refusing to defend the presidential candidate. He said Trump undermined Republican doctrines of free trade and free markets, and said Trump’s attack on a Mexican-American judge displayed a “textbook definition of racism.”
For a brief while after Trump’s improbable election, Ryan found himself in The Donald’s dog house, with top Trump advisers pondering plans to remove him as speaker. According to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump fulminated at Ryan’s “insults.” The congressman groveled, and a top Trump aide described “Ryan rising to a movie-version level of flattery and sucking-up painful to witness.”
Trump felt triumphant, Wolff wrote, seeing the newly contrite Speaker as “a chastened Ryan as suddenly and satisfyingly abject, submissive and useful.”
For a brief while after Trump’s improbable election, Ryan found himself in The Donald’s dog house, but he has emerged as a central force in Trump’s heartless presidency.
Ryan has gone beyond submissive, however, and has become a central force shaping and driving Trump’s heartless presidency. At the same time, he has advanced his carefully calculated plan to shrink taxes for the super-rich and the corporations they manage, and shred the social safety net.
In Trump, Ryan has found a badly informed creature, disinterested in even the broad outlines of policy but who nonetheless has the power to hold Republicans in line to approve Ryan’s elite-focused goals. Ryan has skillfully substituted his hardline agenda for Trump’s empty rhetoric about “the forgotten man and woman.”
Ordinary Americans in crumbling de-industrialized factory towns and depressed rural areas—like those in Ryan’s own Wisconsin district—are once again finding themselves forgotten. The Ryan program ignores their fast-receding prospects and rising afflictions like opioid abuse.
Ryan has become Trump’s most effective defender in the media, using the remaining shards of his credibility to shield the President at his most reckless and impetuous. Some examples:
Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey prompted Ryan to whimper, “He’s new at this.”
Trump’s description of neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville as including some “very fine people” moved Ryan to state “he’s learning . . . his heart is in the right place.”
After Trump’s racist characterization of African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries,” Ryan could only squeeze out the faint-hearted response that these comments were “unhelpful.”
In the wake of Trump’s inaction after mass assault-rifle murders, Ryan, a recipient of almost $172,000 from the National Rifle Association in 2016, was nowhere in sight.
In return, Trump has been willing to trample his campaign pledges in support of Ryan’s cruel economic priorities. Though the President’s 2019 budget won't directly cut Social Security payments to retirees or Medicare, it will make serious cuts to other entitlement programs such as food stamps.
The tax cuts sought by Ryan and approved by Trump were designed to quite deliberately produce giant deficits. This will in turn trigger urgent calls from Ryan and allies to reduce public debt by applying a chainsaw to social programs vital to society’s “takers”—working people and the poor.
“We’re going to have to get back next year at entitlement reform, which is how you tackle the debt and the deficit,” Ryan declared.
In the absence of any interest in governing by the President, Ryan has been able to focus on his pet issues.
Launch yet one more assault on the Affordable Care Act? Ryan was there, leading the charge. Convert Trump’s fuzzy and contradictory ideas on taxes to a program slashing those of corporations and the super-rich? Ryan was there, helping craft Trump’s only tangible accomplishment.
Ryan has served nearly two decades in Congress, managing to persuade numerous Beltway commentators that he had “a touch of a reformist impulse, plus the bonus of not being Donald Trump,” as one easily-impressed pundit put it.
In reality, we have seen a merger between Trump, clueless on policy but obsessed with exercising power on a grand scale, and Ryan, driven by brutal free-market fundamentalism and intent on using Trump to ram through his own agenda.