Remember Paul Ryan? Former wonky wunderkind of the Republican Party, reluctant House speaker, failed savior of Mitt Romney’s presidential ticket. The guy who got the hell out of dodge as soon as he got his dream tax cuts for the rich passed, just in time to lose the House majority and have to hand the gavel back to Nancy Pelosi.
Yeah, that guy.
Well, he still sucks. Sure, you haven’t seen his name in headlines much since he quit his day job in Congress and headed for the sweet life on the board of Fox Corp., but rest assured, he doesn’t suck any less than when his name and his smug face graced the papers on the daily.
Ryan, you see, emerges every now and then to tell people that Donald Trump is kinda bad. Here he is on Fox News—hey, what a coincidence!—bemoaning the damage Trump has done to Ryan’s beloved GOP.
“He has cost us a lot of seats,” Ryan said, which is true. “He cost us the Senate twice, he cost us the House, because he is nominating—he is pushing through the primaries people who cannot win general elections but who pledge fealty to him.” Also true.
“Ever since 2016, we’ve been losing seats,” Ryan added. Also true again! Check out the big brain on Paul!
It’s not just about being a big old loser who’s a drag on the ticket. Trump’s also “unfit for office,” Ryan said, because he was willing to put himself above the Constitution.
This isn’t the first time Ryan has criticized Trump.
“Trump’s not a conservative,” Ryan said at an event last December. “He’s a populist, authoritarian narcissist.”
And here’s Ryan the year before that, trashing the guy—after expressing his pride at all the great things they accomplished together.
“I am a Never-Again-Trumper. Why? Because I want to win, and we lose with Trump. It was really clear to us in ’18, in ’20 and now in 2022.”
And the year before that, Ryan even said Republicans who didn’t vote to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 insurrection he invoked lacked “guts.” Tough talk!
He even bravely conceded in 2021 that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
“It was not rigged. It was not stolen,” he said. “Donald Trump lost the election. Joe Biden won the election. It’s really clear.”
So given his years of criticism of Trump and his warnings of just how dangerous Trump is to the party and the country—and also given that Ryan is now living it up in the private sector, where he doesn’t have to woo any voters or appease the farthest-right wing of the Republican Party—you’d think he would feel free to do the right thing and vote for the one not-Trump option on the ballot this November.
You’d think. But you’d be wrong.
“I wrote in a Republican the last time,” Ryan said last month. “I’m gonna write in a Republican this time.”
That’s funny because the only way to beat Trump is to vote for the guy running against Trump. And that would be the other guy on the ballot, who is very much not a Republican.
But alas. For all of his faux principles, and the fact that he has absolutely nothing to lose by voting for Biden, he is—first, last, and always—a Republican. And a cowardly one at that. While he’s willing to give a little dig at Trump here and there to an eager reporter willing to listen, he’s not willing to do the right thing and actually stop Trump from taking office again. He’d like a pat on the head for being against Trump, please and thank you, without having to actually do the one simple thing to stop Trump: vote against him.Â
