“If Donald Trump becomes President, do you see your vision and his vision aligning in a way to get things done?” a reporter for KETV, in Nebraska, asked Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the House, on Sunday, as Ryan campaigned for a local congressional candidate. A moment earlier, Ryan had talked about getting “beneath the personality question.” But, as the subject switched to Trump, he answered with what sounded like eager anticipation. “Yes—I’ve spoken to him a number of times and he does support our agenda,” Ryan said. “So I do know we have common cause on the big, critical foundational issues of the day.”

Earlier in the weekend, Ryan was in Nevada, campaigning for two congressional candidates there. As he talked about a letter that James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., had sent to congressional leaders about a new cache of e-mails possibly related to Hillary Clinton’s private server, he said, “For the young people here who didn’t live in the ’90s, like we did, this is what life is like with the Clintons,” according to the Las Vegas Sun. “It’s scandal after scandal after scandal. Right around the corner, another investigation, you don’t know what’s coming next, playing by a different set of rules, using the system to help themselves, not to help us. Good grief. Do we want four years of this?”

It was an easy shot. But, even before the Comey news broke, Ryan had called on James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, to bar Clinton from getting the classified briefings that both Presidential candidates receive on the grounds that she couldn’t be trusted with classified information. He was, apparently, fine with Trump getting his.

This was the Paul Ryan who, in the popular imagination, is nearly crippled by his dismay at the unfitness and the amoralism of Donald Trump. After the revelation of outtakes from “Access Hollywood,” in which Trump bragged about grabbing women by the genitals, Ryan let it be known that he would no longer “defend” Trump—because Ryan, as he wanted people to understand, was not that sort of guy. He was an ideas man; all he cared about were conservative principles and holding the House by any means necessary. One of his ideas, though, was that he would still endorse Trump. That detail is one that people on both sides of the political spectrum tend to overlook. Some Democrats, hungrily looking for evidence of Trump’s isolation, saw Ryan as a man who simply couldn’t sully himself by spending a minute more in the demagogue’s camp.

At the same time, the endorsement wasn’t quite enough for the more radical Republicans in the House’s Freedom Caucus, who are threatening to bring down Ryan because, among other reasons, they do not view him as sufficiently pro-Trump. But it is a measure of the irrationality of some in the caucus that they don’t appreciate everything that Ryan has been doing for Trump. Earlier in the interview with KETV, he said, of the election, “We need to win the whole thing so we can get our ideas into law.” On Tuesday morning, on “Fox & Friends,” Ryan said that he had already cast his vote for “our nominee” in early voting in Wisconsin, adding, “We need to support our entire Republican ticket.” Then he started talking about Clinton scandals. (“They live beyond the rules.”) Asked how much his proposals on Obamacare had in common with Trump’s, Ryan said they were “virtually at one and the same. We’ve talked with Donald all year long on these things . . . same with rebuilding national security, securing the border.” In other words, his job was not just keeping the House to provide a divided-government bulwark against the Democrats in an election against Hillary Clinton; his job was to beat her.

Perhaps there is no practical alternative: he is one of his party’s leaders. But could we, then, put aside the idea that there is something remarkable and almost touching about his dilemma? The “ideas” that he always wishes he could make this election about are on the far-conservative end of the Republican Party spectrum. (Stripping away the social safety net, defunding Planned Parenthood.) He has said that one of the reasons he is eager to see Trump elected is that he believes he’d like the look of a Trump Supreme Court. Ryan had, even before the “Access Hollywood” video emerged, avoided talking too much about Trump, at least in his most visible speeches. But he has counterbalanced that, and done what he can to placate conservatives, by demonizing Hillary Clinton. Hours after Comey’s announcement, he put out a statement that began, “Yet again, Hillary Clinton has nobody but herself to blame. She was entrusted with some of our nation’s most important secrets, and she betrayed that trust by carelessly mishandling highly classified information.” Comey’s move, he said, was “long overdue.” There was an accompanying tweet of the “nobody but herself to blame” line, with a photo of a frustrated-looking Clinton with her hand to her head. More tweets on the subject followed. (“Do we really want four more years of this?”)

If Clinton does win, and Ryan remains the House Speaker, how much support he gives his caucus in its search for scandals will matter. And if campaign rhetoric is any indication, the House will become a baroque tableau of hearings and investigations. That may be a requirement for him to keep his job; it may also be what he wants himself.

The same day Ryan campaigned in Nebraska, “This American Life” did a segment in which Ira Glass, the host, spoke about the supposed tragedy of Paul Ryan. “He exercises and he’s careful about his diet and he’s a policy nerd and he’s polite and he’s kind of proper,” and yet his voters were going for someone, Trump, with the opposite qualities. Some of them, though, are likely doing so because Ryan is endorsing Trump. In some states where Republican leaders refused to do so or renounced their endorsement—notably, Utah—it seems to have made a difference. It is possible that political leadership and courage still matter more than political theatre. “This American Life” commissioned a song, performed by Neal Patrick Harris, in which a sad Paul Ryan articulated what he’d tell Republican voters if he dared: “It hurt to see you running to him / I hope in time you’ll see right through him / And I’ll be there when the nightmare has ended.” On the awkward point of the endorsement: “It’s only for your sake that I endorsed / I’m sure you could tell it was completely forced.”

Not really. Paul Ryan does seem to be conflicted. But, on the basis of the evidence, the conflict is not between his principles and his partisan obligations but between his intellectual vanity and his opportunism. He is not emblematic of a party that got hijacked but of one that hoped to simultaneously achieve a radical agenda, play to its base’s worst fears, and still be celebrated in polite society. And that is not, in the end, a very interesting study in character. Paul Ryan may just be a very ordinary politician.