Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, in May. Photograph by Samuel Corum / Anadolu Agency / Getty

“The comment about the judge the other day just was out of left field, from my mind,” Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, said Friday, on a Milwaukee radio show. He was referring to Donald Trump’s claim that Judge Gonzalo Curiel was not fit to preside over the Trump University fraud case because of his “Mexican heritage.” Trump has been saying things like that for twenty-five years. Yet, as Ryan would have it, his attack on Curiel comes like a ball thrown wildly, seemingly out of nowhere. Over the weekend, Trump also suggested that he wouldn’t trust Muslim judges. If Ryan didn’t see that one coming, the baseball metaphor he may actually be looking for is that of an infielder standing half asleep in the baselines, daydreaming about his own glory, as a runner comes barrelling at him. He’s about to slide hard.

But Ryan, who repeated on Tuesday morning that he believes Trump is the best hope for making the House Republicans’ “agenda,” which débuts this week, a reality—even as he called the Curiel remark the “textbook definition of a racist comment"—isn’t really asleep, and the feigned surprise does not flatter him. During the past few days, the formula for leading Republicans has been to portray Trump’s racism as an oddity that has nothing to do with the Republican Party, and then to reiterate that they support his candidacy because it has everything to do with the Party realizing its aspirations. Ryan has been an exemplar in that respect. Trump’s view of Curiel was “reasoning I don’t relate to,” Ryan told the radio host, Vicki McKenna, adding, almost in the same breath, that what really mattered was that Trump could be trusted when it came to—of all things—picking judges. Ryan had delayed endorsing Trump because he worried about regulation undermining self-government, and he’d “wanted to make sure where he stood on that and on judges.” Now, after many “meetings and conversations,” he felt "much more comfortable” that Trump would be the right sort of “partner,” one who would name “conservative jurists” to the bench and shape the Supreme Court for generations. Ryan didn’t sound worried about whether there would be many Hispanic (or Muslim) names on Trump's list, or about what he would do if President Trump defied a Supreme Court ruling for which Sonia Sotomayor had provided the swing vote, claiming it was biased. To really know Trump, in Ryan’s telling, was to have faith in him.

On Monday, Senator Lindsey Graham, who has said that he is essentially sitting out this election, told the Times that Trump’s comments were “the most un-American thing from a politician since Joe McCarthy,” and that “if anybody was looking for an off-ramp, this is probably it.” Not many of his fellow-Republicans are taking that exit, though. Instead, their goal, in response to the Curiel slur, seems to be to say something just un-un-American enough to get into a montage of supposedly rational Republican voices, while still affirming that they are behind Trump. (And without making Trump angry.) On Sunday, for example, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, appearing on “Meet the Press,” said, of the Curiel comments, "I couldn't disagree more with a statement like that,” and spoke about America’s immigrant heritage. But when Chuck Todd asked if he considered Trump’s comments racist, McConnell refused to answer. And when Todd brought up a post by the conservative blogger Erick Erickson, who wrote that “the party of Lincoln intends to circle the wagons around a racist,” McConnell said, with an affronted air, "I think the Party of Lincoln wants to win the White House. And the right-of-center world needs to respect the fact that the primary voters have spoken”—to respect Trump, in a word. Trump was the nominee, and so he had no choice. “We have a two-party system,” McConnell said. (We do, which one might think meant that there is no rule actually saying that someone who has been a Republican in the past must vote for a Republican in every circumstance.) McConnell did manage to express his worry that the Party would lose Hispanic votes. He didn’t seem to care about whether it ought to lose them.

Senator Bob Corker, the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, was even less interested in engaging with the question of what it meant to be in the Party of Trump. "Look, I don't condone the comments. And we can press on to another topic,” he told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. Corker continued, "I think we have to move beyond that, and I think he has a tremendous opportunity to disrupt the direction that Washington is moving in and create tremendous opportunity.” When Stephanopoulos did press him, about the wall that Trump wants to build on the Mexican border, Corker said, testily, "I thought this interview was going to be more about the foreign-policy arena. I think he has a tremendous opportunity there." Corker, who has been mentioned as a possible running mate for Trump, may be confused about what counts as a “tremendous opportunity,” and for whom, in a future Trump Administration. (Stephanopoulos, meanwhile, noted that our relations with Mexico do count as foreign policy.) The Republican response to Trump, in light of the shameful attacks on Judge Curiel, is a remarkable study in how ambition breeds passivity.

Partisanship has become a sort of learned helplessness. Senator Marco Rubio, who once said that he would decry Trump from the back of a truck if he had no other forum, has announced that he, too, will work to get him elected—and the assault on Curiel hasn’t changed that. On Monday, speaking to a local television station in Florida, Rubio said, of Trump’s call to take the judge off the case, “I think it’s wrong. He needs to stop saying it.” He added, "I consistently said that if he became the nominee we would face these sorts of difficult choices we now have." But Rubio had made what he viewed as a “binding agreement” to support the nominee, and he emphasized that he still thought that Trump was the better option. “If you were asking me about Hillary Clinton, I’d have a lot of complaints about her,” Rubio said.

Where are the Republicans who might, for example, resign from the Cabinet as a matter of principle if a President Trump moved to shred the rights of minorities or ignore the law and the Constitution in some other way? The closer the polls get, with the prospect that Trump might actually be able to win, the more ready for Donald the Party’s leaders have become. They are less willing to confront him on a fundamental level and more willing to “press on” past his bigotry. The opposite should be the case.

“We’re just different people. We have a different tone, a different style,” Ryan said of Trump. What counted, though, were the “principles and the policies that come from them.” Is saying that a Hispanic judge has no right to do his job—that he is, essentially, someone whose citizenship will always be probationary—a matter of style? Trump "clearly says and does things I don’t agree with,” Ryan said. "And I've had to speak up from time to time. I will continue to do that if it's necessary. I hope it’s not.” Ryan may want to live in hope; baseball provides good metaphors for that, too. The problem is that Ryan wants the rest of us to live under Trump.

Trump himself does not seem to be ready to let the Republicans sit on the sidelines in decorous silence. On Monday, according to a Bloomberg report, in a conference call with surrogates, Trump dismissed advice that they’d received from his own campaign about skirting the Trump University question as “stupid.” He said that the people criticizing his Curiel comments "are the racists”—not him. “I would go at ’em,” he said. “I'd let them have it.” Listening to the Republican leadership, it can be hard to tell a genuine delusion from a despairing rationalization or an opportunistic lie. But it’s getting easier all the time.