Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent at Politico Magazine.

It was barely 2 o'clock in the afternoon and Paul Ryan was offering me a beer.

We stood in a cramped break room — microwave, sink, refrigerator stocked with Miller Lite — on the third floor of a brick building in Janesville, Wisconsin, making small talk before sitting down in his adjacent office for a lengthy interview. Ryan was relieved to be home. A few weeks earlier, he had packed up his final belongings and left Washington for good, ending a 20-year career in Congress that saw him occupy roles ranging from right-wing wunderkind to vice presidential candidate to unifier of a fractured party to chief enabler of President Donald Trump.


That final leg of Ryan's political journey had been the most exhausting. Once upon a time, he had been mortified at the prospect of Trump as the GOP nominee, spending much of 2015 and 2016 telling anyone who would listen that the reality TV star was immoral and unfit for office. Even after Trump vanquished the Republican primary field, Ryan refused to muffle his objections, at one point memorably rebuking the party’s new standard-bearer for making “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” Yet when the time came for choosing on November 8, 2016 — to risk his speakership by continuing to hold the new president accountable or preserve his standing in the party by taking a vow of silence — Ryan did not think twice. There was historic work to be done, he told friends, and quarreling with Trump would prove wholly counterproductive. He could not afford to be both the speaker of the House and the conscience of the Republican Party.

What ensued was a bruising, mortifying, tortured 26-month partnership between two men who disliked one another but had become convinced of the necessity of a ceasefire. It was, Ryan told friends, at once the most auspicious and agonizing stretch of his adult life. Even while securing enormous new funding for the military and rewriting the tax code, he knew history would remember Republicans for operating in the shadow of a president whose performance eclipsed their hardest-won legislative accomplishments.

Ryan’s dilemma was much like the conundrum the Republican Party faces today: Do we condemn Trump’s latest offensive comments — in this case a string of tweets and remarks urging a quartet of Democratic lawmakers of color to “go back” to their countries of origin — or do we swallow our tongues and work with the man? Should we look to history’s judgment, or just try to get as much done as possible despite our distaste? Most Republicans have chosen the latter, even if they might regret it later.

Does Ryan have regrets? A few. Having remained acquiescent until the day he left office — including during our first interview for my new book, in the fall of 2018, when the speaker uttered nary a negative syllable about the president — he was ready to unleash in retirement. There was no mistaking the look in his eye or the tone in his voice; having covered the former House speaker for many years, talked with him countless times and studied his mannerisms, I could sense immediately when we met in Janesville that he was both liberated (hence the afternoon beer offering) and deeply, visibly agitated. He was ready, at long last, to unpack his conscience.

He started with some throat-clearing, touting the “legal substance that stands a longer test of time” than Trump's demagoguery — a restructured tax code, a bigger military, a conservative judiciary. But Ryan’s grimace gave him away. It was obvious, as he went on talking about the “disruption" roiling the nation and how America has endured “ugly” periods before, that Ryan had begun to reckon with the legacy of Trumpism and his role in accessorizing it. It didn’t take much poking for the dam to burst.

“We’ve gotten so numb to it all,” he told me. “Not in government, but where we live our lives. We have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example. And prop up other institutions that do the same. You know?”

For a man who ascended to the speakership, two heartbeats away from the American presidency, Ryan has never possessed finely tuned political antennas. His aides have long joked, and often cringed, about a certain aloofness that accompanied his self-projected image as a “policy guy.” But I got the sense that Ryan knew what he was doing in that moment. It was not a momentary lapse when he invoked the president's former porn-star mistress. Nor was it a slip of the tongue when, time and again as the interview wore on, he described Trump’s clumsiness as a chief executive, detailed the measures taken to keep the government from falling apart, and emphasized how often he’d held back on scolding the president publicly for fear of making a bad national situation worse.

Ryan recognized the gravity of what he was saying and the backlash it would invite from the most powerful man in the world. He also seemed to anticipate the outrage it would elicit from critics who would demand to know: Why not push back on the president's misdeeds while still holding the second-most powerful job in government?

“I felt a major onset of responsibility to help the institutions survive,” Ryan recalled, telling me how he didn't sleep one wink on election night 2016. “So, from the next day on, my mantra was: ‘Only one person can be speaker of the House. I’m not a pundit, I’m not a think-tanker. Our job from now on is to build up the country’s antibodies ... to have the guardrails up, to drive the car down the middle of the road, and don’t let the car go off into the ditch.’"

Ryan added: “I told myself, I got to have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right. Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government. So I thought, I can’t be his scold, like I was. ... I wanted to scold him all the time. What I learned as I went on, to scratch that itch, I had to do it in private. So, I did it in private—all the time. And he actually ended up kind of appreciating it. We had more arguments with each other than pleasant conversations, over the last two years. And it never leaked.”

His justification for this approach is simple: The alternative could have been worse. If Ryan went after Trump every day, and the president went nuclear and pushed him out of the speakership, then who would be left to lead the House? Kevin McCarthy, a yes-man with far less inclination to tangle with Trump? Or perhaps one of the Freedom Caucus honchos, Jim Jordan or Mark Meadows, hard-liners known to encourage the president's most self-destructive impulses? Like many of his allies in the administration — then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, then-White House chief of staff John Kelly, then- Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — Ryan believed that only by avoiding public confrontation with the president could he retain his influence and that only by retaining his influence could he help mitigate the damage being done by Trump.

“Those of us around him really helped to stop him from making bad decisions. All the time,” Ryan said. “It worked pretty well. He was really deferential and kind of learning the ropes. ... We helped him make much better decisions, which were contrary to kind of what his knee-jerk reaction was.”

Of course, Mattis and Kelly and Tillerson served at the pleasure of the president. Ryan did not. He was charged with leading a co-equal branch of the federal government, the one assigned primacy under Article I of the Constitution, the one responsible for checking the excesses and abuses of the executive. It's true that speaking out might have cost him his job. But it's also true that Ryan's silence — and the silence of so many Republicans, from party leaders to rank-and-file members — emboldened Trump to push his rhetoric into ever-darker places.

The day I conceived of writing this book was Friday, January 8, 2016. I was in Columbia, South Carolina, having dinner with a friend and former colleague, Ron Brownstein, who pushed the idea of a reported narrative on the long-running Republican “civil war.” Ron and I were both in Columbia to cover an event Saturday morning: "The Poverty Summit," as it was called, a forum co-hosted by Speaker Ryan and Senator Tim Scott meant to showcase the GOP's outreach to poor and minority voters. In front of the most multiethnic crowd I'd ever seen at a Republican event, numerous presidential hopefuls — Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, John Kasich — took turns joining Ryan and Scott onstage to discuss the imperative of expanding the party's message, becoming more inclusive, embracing diversity and empathy as core American characteristics.

Donald Trump didn't show up that day. He rejected the invitation to attend. That was just fine with Ryan: He told friends that weekend that it was their mission to neutralize Trumpism or else risk losing control of their party. "We have a bifurcated country, we have a polarized country,” Ryan told me that weekend, sitting inside a downtown hotel conference room. “One of the reasons I think it’s polarized is because of identity politics on the left. Now some on the right are playing it.”

When I asked who on the right was guilty of playing identity politics, Ryan just smiled. It was a confident smile: Given what he knew about Republican politics, given the energy in Columbia that weekend, given the hunger he saw for unity and aspirational politics, he was going to lead the charge to vanquish Trumpism and deliver the GOP into a new era.

As we sat together three years later in Janesville, that smile had vanished. And it was Ryan — along with his vision for the party — who had been vanquished. He acknowledges he could have done more to push back against Trumpism, but knowing what we know now, he doubted it would have altered the outcome. As I wrote in the book:

For a long stretch of the 2016 campaign, Ryan refused to accept Trump’s takeover of the GOP. He traversed the stages of grief: denial (no way can Trump win), anger (“I called him a racist!”), bargaining (the RNC PowerPoint slides), and depression (“This is fatal,” he told Reince Priebus) before finally coming to terms with it. This resistance was grounded in a basic belief that the Republican Party was still his party. Looking back, Ryan says, he should have known better. Having considered the converging political, cultural, and socioeconomic events of the twenty-first century and reflected on them in the context of historical intraparty ideological swings, he recognizes now that the American right was primed, even overdue, for revolution.

That revolution produced a president who has remade conservatism, and the GOP itself, in his own image: "isolationist, protectionist, and kind of xenophobic, anti-immigrant," as Ryan describes it. The party has fallen in line: The reason so few Republican lawmakers are willing to challenge Trump when he espouses hateful, bigoted rhetoric — as he did this week — is that they recognize the party is now Trump's, and to challenge him is to suffer the sort of excommunication Ryan feared.

The irony, of course, is that Ryan wound up on Trump's enemies list anyway — called "weak" and "stupid" and a "failure" by a president who leaned heavily on the speaker to pass the party's legislative agenda through a fratricidal Congress.

If the past week has taught Republicans anything, it's that history will not recall fondly those who wait until their time in government has expired to warn the world of the president's inadequacies. Many will remain silent because they view his custody of the party as fleeting and unsustainable, believing that his eventual exit from office will allow them rehabilitate the Republican brand. And yet, that silence is what solidifies Trump's chokehold on the American right — a lesson Ryan had to learn the hard way.

“Trumpism is a moment, a populist moment we’re in, that’s going to be here after Trump is gone. And that’s something that we’re going to have to learn how to deal with,” Ryan said. “I’m a traditional conservative, and traditional conservatives are definitely not ascendant in the party right now. ... We called our wing ‘the growth wing,’ and we won for a good 20 years. And now their wing is winning. But it’s cyclical. We beat the paleocons in the early '90s; they’re beating us now.

“The Reagan Republican wing beat the Rockefeller Republican wing,” Ryan concluded. “And now the Trump wing beat the Reagan wing.”

