You’d resent Donald Trump too if you were Republican U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan.

After all, after assuming the speaker’s job and painstakingly putting together a Republican agenda for the future, along comes a guy from Queens — a political outsider, no less — who blows it all up.

No wonder Ryan is bent out of shape. The indignity of it all is enough to make Mitt Romney say spit.

Now the story is not about Ryan, the great hope of the Washington political elite — both Republican and Democrat. No, now the story is about Trump and his campaign against the ethically challenged Hillary Clinton.

Despite what the mainstream media has been telling you, Trump does not need Ryan. Ryan needs Trump.

Ryan is not a Trump supporter; never was. Ryan is part of the Washington establishment and is only taken with fellow members of the establishment — the Marco Rubios, Ted Cruzes, and John Kasichs of the world, fellows who play by the Beltway, status-quo rules and talk the Washington talk.

Trump is the loose cannon, the nonpolitician, the outsider who breaks all the rules. And one of the rules he has broken, in the eyes of the Washington elite, is not to defer to Ryan or kiss his ring, as all the others do.

Trump thinks it should be the other way around, that Ryan should defer to him. Trump not only won the GOP presidential nomination, but he won it big. He amassed 14 million primary votes, the most ever by a Republican presidential primary candidate.

And he has beaten down every Never Trump movement that irate Republicans, like the petulant Romney and others, have thrown at him.

So when Trump looks at Ryan he sees a politician who lost the 2012 election to Barack Obama when he ran as Romney’s vice presidential running mate, an election many thought Romney should have won.

He also sees a politician who comes from one of 435 congressional districts in the country. As a candidate for re-election in 2014, Ryan got 182,316 people to vote for him in Wisconsin’s 1st District, which is pretty good. But it does not compare to the 14 million people that Trump got to vote for him.

And Ryan is being challenged in the GOP primary by Paul Nehlen, a tea party candidate who sounds lot like Trump.

Those who say Ryan cannot be defeated need only to recall the stunning 2014 GOP primary defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in Virginia. Cantor, in line to succeed Speaker John Boehner, was upset by David Brat, an unknown tea party candidate who hammered Cantor on illegal immigration.

Ryan, in the eyes of Trump supporters, is part of the problem, part of the Washington get-rich crowd that is selling the country down the drain through its support of international free trade deals, open borders and globalization that has cost Americans millions of jobs. Americans get discount prices on of foreign made goods that they used to make, but now cannot afford to buy because they have no jobs.

Right now Ryan is still the top Republican in Washington. He has a six-part legislative agenda. Ryan is so important that he comments on Trump’s positions on reorganizing NATO or building a wall along the Mexican border. The press goes to him for comments on Obama’s latest initiatives.

But Trump has pushed Ryan and his agenda aside, just as he elbowed 16 other Republican presidential candidates out of the way in his unique campaign for president. And a lot of people in Washington and in the media resent it.

So when Ryan tells his fellow Republicans in the House to vote their “conscience,” that is code for telling them it is all right to vote for Clinton, despite the fact that Clinton is under a criminal investigation by the FBI. Better the devil you know.

Establishment politicians in Washington, as well as the establishment media, would rather have Clinton as president than Trump. They know her. They can deal with Clinton. She plays, and has played, the Washington insider game for years as first lady, U.S. senator and secretary of state. She can play a game everyone in Washington welcomes and understands She is Obama’s third term.

Trump is the agent of change, and change is the last thing that the political class in Washington wants to see.

If Clinton is elected president, Speaker Ryan is still the top Republican in Washington and a possible candidate for president in 2020.

If Trump is elected president, Ryan is just another empty suit.

Peter Lucas’ political column appears Tuesday and Friday. Email him at luke1825@aol.com.