A week after Donald Trump stunned his advisers by announcing steep tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, Republicans both inside and outside the White House are scrambling to prevent this president's latest tantrum from plunging the country into a costly trade war that he doesn't understand. The potential implications of this decision are so disastrous that on Monday, even Paul Ryan—the House speaker who was widely viewed as the brightest young star of the conservative movement before Trump surgically removed his spine from his body—offered something other than fawning, obsequious praise in response. From The Washington Post:

“We are extremely worried about the consequences of a trade war and are urging the White House to not advance with this plan,” AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), said in a statement Monday. “The new tax reform law has boosted the economy and we certainly don’t want to jeopardize those gains.”

Here is an incomplete list of things that Donald Trump has said or done while in office, to which Paul Ryan's public responses have ranged somewhere from "tepid criticism" to "craven silence": attempted to prohibit trans people from serving in the military; fired James Comey, the man who was investigating him; promulgated multiple Muslim bans; referred to African nations as "shithole countries"; repeatedly attacked news reports he doesn't like as "fake"; refused to acknowledge Russia's role in interfering with U.S. elections; allowed his dopey son-in-law to work in the White House on an interim top-secret security clearance for more than a year; told the grieving widow of a Special Forces soldier that "he knew what he signed up for"; characterized multiple criminal indictments of people in his inner circle, several of which have led to guilty pleas, as the products of a "witch hunt"; and, of course, defended murderous neo-Nazis in Charlottesville as "very fine people."

To Ryan, none of these things has been alarming enough to prompt him to exercise his authority as speaker and act as a meaningful check on Trump's behavior. Tariffs that sent the Dow into a 400-point tailspin, though, and that have Wall Street types very worried about their production costs, and that jeopardize the meager savings that the Republican Party's tax-reform bill might afford to millions of working-class Americans? No, as a legislator but also as a patriot, Paul Ryan simply cannot stand for such executive malfeasance. Again, from the Post:

The office of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) on Monday emailed reporters a CNBC.com article with the headline, “Dow opens more than 100 points lower as trade war fears rattle investors,” a very unusual way to directly critique White House policy. The Dow Jones industrial average is now down more than 2,000 points from its record high in January.

Alas, this courage was all for naught. When told of the speaker's comments, Trump reassured reporters that he "won't be backing down" on the issue, which means that in the coming days, you can expect Ryan to issue a new statement proclaiming the tariffs to be "actually good" and "tactically brilliant" and "what Ayn Rand would have wanted, really." He will then slink quietly back into his office, close the door behind him, and spend the rest of the day softly stroking the vintage "ROMNEY RYAN 2012" bumper sticker he keeps hidden in his desk drawer, trying to pinpoint where it all went wrong.

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