Even in the warmest of times, a president must bring tactical delicacy to his dealings with Congress. Readers of Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, which depicts the White House as the playpen of a maniac, will have to judge for themselves if Donald Trump is pulling off such subtleties. In the meantime, what do you do if you’re Paul Ryan? What you’ve already been doing: praying for the rise of Mike Pence and working on what inspires you. Some of us love painting or ballet dancing. Paul Ryan loves entitlement reform. His work proceeds.

This might seem crazy. Donald Trump vowed during his campaign not to touch entitlements, and back in 2011 he described Paul Ryan’s efforts to cut Medicare as a “death wish.” Voters don’t like entitlement cuts. Mitch McConnell doesn’t want them. Ryan has already helped to lead his party to disaster with them. He helped lead an effort in 2005 to partially privatize Social Security, and the midterm elections that followed, while never auspicious for Republicans to begin with, brought Republican reversals even bigger than people had expected, flipping the House back to the Democrats. “Having lived through the failed Social Security push in 2005,” Ryan would later write, “I knew that the next president would need a mandate, not just a victory.” Or maybe just a victory, after all.

Why do this, then?

To start with, love is love, and, as noted, Ryan loves entitlement reform. Lowering taxes and undoing much of what Democrats wrought from the 1930s to the 1960s—Social Security and Medicare, foremost—is a long-standing dream. Other Republicans share that dream. Marco Rubio has a vision of reduced entitlements. So does Ted Cruz. Ryan is undoubtedly hopeful that he can get prevent elderly rage by sparing anyone over, say, 40 from the cuts. When you’re young, you’re likelier to think you’ll be so rich when old that you won’t need a government payout anyway.

Ryan also knows that Trump needs the support of House and Senate Republicans as the sharks circle. Every day that a Ryan-allied Republican like Devin Nunes helps to keep Trump out of trouble during the investigations by Robert Mueller, turning a spotlight on the F.B.I., is one for which Trump is newly in the debt of Nunes. Nunes does not want to see harsh immigration measures, but, like Ryan, he does want to see entitlement reform. To the extent that pro-Ryan Republicans are helping to shield Trump from his enemies, Trump must do something to repay the favor. That means they get to determine legislative priorities.

Finally, the things Trump would like to see done—on infrastructure, immigration—are things Ryan would like to see not done. Opposing Trump directly is a headache. Wasting Trump’s time, on the other hand, is easy. Every minute that Republicans spend on a quixotic effort to change Social Security and Medicare as we know them is one in which they dodge consideration of infrastructure or immigration. Even if Trump takes a hard line on immigration negotiations and allows DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, to expire, it’s better for Ryan if there’s some other issue to command the spotlight. Plus, people believe Ryan is planning his departure from Congress this year anyway.

Still, all of this is remarkable. There were always ample reasons to think Trump would be a disastrous president, but he nevertheless came to office on the basis of populist campaign promises. Trump’s base cannot stand Paul Ryan. Steve Bannon, during the presidential campaign, viewed Ryan as “the enemy” (and, hard as it is to remember, Bannon and Trump did at one point agree with one another). Trump didn’t have to run as hard or as rudely against the establishment as he did, at least once he’d secured the nomination, yet he stayed belligerent to the end. So Trump’s supporters weren’t crazy to think he might follow through on some of his rhetoric and scramble party lines, at the expense of people like Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.