During last year’s Republican primaries, Marco Rubio famously described Donald Trump as a “con artist.” But this week, with the disastrous rollout of the American Health Care Act, we’ve seen the con artist get played by an even slicker, more professional grifter. And Trump is not alone in being conned: House Speaker Paul Ryan has been fooling a lot of people for a long time, making the world believe that he’s the foremost Republican policy wonk, an expert in the fine print of budgets who could bring a much-needed seriousness to Washington. In an ideal world, the damage caused by Ryan’s role in pushing the deeply flawed AHCA won’t be limited to his relationship with Trump. This episode should strike at the real root cause of the mess: The powerful, persistent Washington myth that Ryan is a policy genius.

Trump is reportedly blaming Ryan in private for the whole catastrophe. “Mr. Trump has told four people close to him that he regrets going along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s plan to push a health care overhaul before unveiling a tax cut proposal more politically palatable to Republicans,” The New York Times reports.

Trump’s big mistake was not just political—thinking that Ryan could muster the votes to pass the law. It was also a matter of policy—believing that Ryan actually had some idea of what a good plan would be. But it’s not just Trump that got bamboozled. Almost everyone in American politics has bought into the idea that Ryan is a pillar of GOP competence and seriousness.

As Ezra Klein noted at Vox, Ryan’s health-care gambit was certainly a policy failure (“a shoddy piece of work”). It embodied what his “genius” has always boiled down to: Deceptively smart-sounding ways to advance the great goals of the Republican establishment (tax cuts for the rich, fewer services for everyone else). Those goals are in direct opposition to the populist promises Trump made in the campaign. But that’s where Ryan’s real talent came in.

“Ryan’s stroke of genius,” Klein wrote, “has been flattering Trump’s vision of himself as a dealmaker through the process, and amping up Trump’s sense of the personal stake he has in the AHCA’s success.” In the process, Ryan persuaded Trump to abandon the promises he made on the campaign trail to defend entitlements and protect coverage for everyone. He’d brought Trump over the same plutocratic agenda that Ryan champions.

