Paul Ryan’s roast of Donald Trump at last fall’s AI Smith dinner in New York may be the closest the Speaker has ever come to admitting his true feelings about the president. “Every morning, I wake up in my office and scroll Twitter to see which tweets I will have to pretend that I didn’t see later,” he told the audience. The remark was intended as a joke, but it hit uncomfortably close to home: Ryan seems visibly uncomfortable when asked to respond to the president’s positions or remarks, historically brushing aside questions with a trademark lipless grimace plastered to his face. Technically speaking, the guy ought to be happier: thanks to Trump, some of his lifelong policy goals have finally become reality. But as Speaker of the House, not to mention one of several Republicans who repeatedly scuttled away from Trump during the election, Ryan’s Faustian bargain with a president so bent on corroding the traditional values of the Republican Party—not to mention purging it of all dissenters—has seemed especially egregious.

Though he insists otherwise, Ryan’s hot-and-cold relationship with Trump—one full of half-hearted wrist slaps and the occasional public ring-kissing—certainly seemed like one of the key reasons for his abrupt announcement this spring that he would retire as Speaker, just months before a contentious midterm that could very well see Republicans lose the House. But unlike other conservatives who bailed from public life and burned their bridges (see: Arizona’s Jeff Flake), Ryan claims he does not regret his choice to placate the president. In a lengthy exit interview with Mark Leibovich in The New York Times, the Janesville, Wisconsin, retiree frequently insists that refraining from criticizing the president was, in fact, the best way to handle him, if the goal was to prevent chaos and destruction.

Public critiques of Trump, Ryan adroitly notes, have a tendency to “boomerang.” When presented with a counter-argument, the president “goes in the other direction, so that’s not effective.” (A public review of the Ryan-Trump relationship confirms the Speaker’s assessment: after Ryan privately disavowed Trump’s comments on the Access Hollywood tape, Trump tweeted that Ryan was a “weak and ineffective leader.”) In exchange for his dignity, Ryan insists that he’s gotten something even better from Trump, apart from his long-desired tax-cut bill: