To adapt the old phrase to today’s G.O.P.: The ships are leaving the sinking rat.

That’s the moral of Paul Ryan’s unexpected but not surprising announcement this week that he will give up the speakership — the second Republican speaker to do so in just three years — and retire after 20 years in the House. The Wisconsin congressman pleaded a desire to spend more time raising his children. This, presumably, after he’d abandoned hope of raising the child in the White House.

Ryan’s departure comes atop the three dozen and counting House Republicans who’ve decided they have better things to do in life than either lose their seats in November or spend the next few years in the likely minority, carping about Nancy Pelosi and trying to stop the president’s impeachment.

Many of these Republicans once believed that Donald Trump alone possessed the kind of political virility needed to vanquish Hillary Clinton and make America great again. Only belatedly have they figured out that the virility comes with a case of syphilis.

“There’s a lot of weariness and a lot of exhaustion, frankly,” Charlie Dent, one of the retiring Republicans, told CNN this week. “The litmus test for being a Republican these days is not about any given set of ideals or principles; it’s about loyalty to the man, and I think that’s challenging.”