Shut Up, Paul Ryan
The former Republican House Speaker's unrepentant past as a GOP swamp darling means even true things he might say about Donald Trump are certain to fall on deaf ears.
Shooting the messenger is a type of ad hominem argument in which a claim is disregarded based on the (real or perceived) objectionable nature of the person making it, rather than whether the claim itself holds up to scrutiny. It’s properly understood to be a fallacy—the worst person in the world is still theoretically capable of uttering true things and good points, while not even the best mortal man or woman is completely immune from the possibility of errors in fact or judgment.
But that’s not to say messengers don’t matter in real-world practice. Human nature, groupthink, and the current political and media environments being what they are, association with the wrong name can kill an argument before it even begins. This week, Fox News inadvertently provided a golden example by interviewing former Republican House Speaker and 2012 vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, who took the opportunity to unload on the GOP’s current excuse for a leader, Donald Trump.
“It’s gonna be a very, very close race,” he told host Neil Cavuto. “I think they’re terrible choices that we’re being presented with. And that’s just what the primary voters selected and I regret the fact that that’s where we are.”
Cavuto then read some of Ryan’s remarks back to him in which Ryan called Trump an “authoritarian narcissist” and said the former president lacks the character for the job.
“That’s pretty strong,” Cavuto said.
“That’s the way I feel,” Ryan replied. “I voted for him in 2016, hoping that there was gonna be a different kind of person in office. And I do think character is a really important issue. If you put yourself above the Constitution as he has done that shows you’re unfit for office.”
“But what happened?” the host asked. “What turned you? Was it the whole January 6 thing?”
“That’s a part of it,” he answered. Ryan reiterated that Trump has placed himself above the Constitution and repeated that Trump is “unfit for office.”
Certain aspects of Ryan’s critique reflect the Beltway bubble in which he marinates—January 6 was a recklessly-desperate, futile, and too-late push to send election results back to certain states for reviews that were never going to happen, not an attempt to override the Constitution; and for all of his underlings’ reckless mouthing off about “retribution,” Trump himself never showed the slightest inclination in office to punish his political opponents for actual crimes, let alone toward “authoritarianism” (indeed, these days he’s so afraid of the label that he’s absurdly claiming he thought the “lock her up” chants about Hillary Clinton were “terrible”).
But the rest is indisputable. Trump or Biden is a terrible choice. Trump is obviously a narcissist. Of course he’s unfit for office.
And Paul Ryan is the worst possible spokesman for these clear-cut truths.
Trump has dominated Republican politics for so long that it’s easy to forget that his rise was a direct reaction to the GOP’s previous domination by politicians like Ryan, who could talk a good game about conservative theory but were consistently lackluster at delivering conservative outcomes.
As detailed by yours truly back in 2016:
The sole rationale for his acclaim, fiscal seriousness, is wildly overblown. For all the left-wing hysterics it inspired at the time, his 2012 plan would have actually left countless programs and agencies untouched, and wouldn’t have balanced the budget until 2040. Worse, a year later he joined Democrat Patty Murray to sabotage Hill Republicans’ only recent, significant fiscal accomplishment, the sequester budget caps. Last year, he and Mitch McConnell gave Obama a $1.1 trillion spending bill that failed to incorporate conservative priorities or gut leftist ones [...]
Sure, Ryan generally takes the right positions on issues (although he voted for TARP, the internet sales tax scheme known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, and for eliminating religious employers’ right to reject employees who reject their faith’s principles), but he’s been AWOL for the fights that would have made a real difference.
As the opposition party to a leftist president, the Republican Congress’s most important job during Obama’s tenure was asserting its constitutional power of the purse to block funding for the Left’s agenda, including the criminal butchers at Planned Parenthood, Obama’s illegal executive amnesty, and the ruinous, unconstitutional Obamacare.
Ryan not only continued John Boehner’s trend of neglecting that duty, he did so while claiming the “constraints of the Constitution” made him lie down—you know, the same Constitution that empowers Congress to withhold funds, for James Madison’s express purpose of reining in wayward branches of government. That, combined with Ryan’s assurance that none of Obama’s clearly impeachable offenses warrant impeachment, sets a precedent President Clinton II is sure to exploit.
Finally, Ryan is a pro-amnesty diehard, from sabotaging efforts to control immigration early in his career to championing the most recent amnesty bill, without regard for its fraudulent enforcement promises. Indeed, his immigration zealotry overrides his other supposed conservative principles so fully that he openly supports “guest workers” for the express purpose of relieving employers of the burden of having to compete for employees by offering higher wages.
This is what millions of desperate, fed-up Republican primary voters were saying “no more” to when they took a chance on the Apprentice guy. They had been burned by GOP insiders so many times that Trump’s perceived outsider status canceled out his severe deficiencies in every other metric of conservative leadership.
Of course, it didn’t take long for Trump to make clear the outsider promise was nothing more than an empty marketing label, starting with helping save Ryan’s speakership and lavishing praise on him in the years that followed. Yet the fiction of Trump as some sort of anti-establishment warrior (a “necessary corrective to the uniparty,” as one formerly-reputable pundit preposterously put it to me recently) persists—even after all the harm he’s done to the country, to the Republican Party, and to conservative causes.
A large portion of the blame for that rests with the bias and dishonesty of the Conservative Infotainment Complex, but it’s also kept alive by Trump’s enemies—not just leftists whose hysterics feed the impression that he’s far more dangerous to their agenda than he really is, but figures like Ryan, Mitt Romney, and Liz Cheney, whose histories of attacking Trump for mostly the wrong reasons give MAGA convenient foils with which to obscure the right reasons and paint all right-of-center criticism of their idol as coming from the same swampy camp.
The comfortable grifts in like-minded ecosystems they typically find after leaving office mean the Paul Ryans will never have to confront how they became part of the problem, but the fact that they were ruins whatever capacity they might have had to be part of the solution. So the best possible thing they could do with whatever truthful observations they might have about Donald Trump would be to keep them to themselves.