“I think it goes without saying we should treat people fairly. No one should be above the rules, no one should be above the law, and that's what we're looking for, equality,” Ryan told CNN's Jake Tapper in a July interview. “So that people should be held to the same set of standards. That's the problem with Washington, is people think there's self-dealing and they think that everybody is being held to different standards. And the problem is that that's true!”

Now that Donald Trump won, those words could come back to haunt Ryan. With each passing day, Trump is tangling himself in a knot of potential business and family conflicts of interest while he runs the country. That means Republicans in Congress could soon find the tables turned: Democrats clamoring for ethics investigations of the president. And what's more, they'd be able to point to Ryan's own argument — that no one should be above the law — to make their case.

It probably won't surprise you to hear that Ryan is not nearly as bullish on investigating Trump as he was Clinton. He has been repeatedly asked over the past week or two how he feels about Trump's potential for conflicts of interest, and his answer has boiled down to: It's not my problem.

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“How do you want him to address his business conflicts?” CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin asked Ryan in an interview Wednesday.

Ryan responded: “However he wants to. You know, this is not what I'm concerned about in Congress.”

When pressed on it again, Ryan said: “I have every bit of confidence he's going to get himself right with moving from being the business guy that he is to the president he's going to become. I'm focused on getting this agenda passed so that we can turn around and tackle this country's big problems before they tackle us. That is what I'm focused on. And not the legal details of how he divorces himself from his business, which I know he will.”

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In other words: As long as Trump is signing my tax reform and Obamacare repeal bills into law, and there's no legally verified conflicts of interest, no problem.

To some degree, that's politics: You hit the opposition when you can, and you duck when they're hitting you, even if it's for arguably the same thing.

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The problem for Ryan is that Trump is giving no indication that he plans to divorce himself from his business at all, at least not in a way that most government ethics experts think is sufficient to prevent a situation in which Trump could make a decision based on his checkbook. And that means accusations of Trump's conflicts of interest probably won't be going away.

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Presidents have had conflicts of interest before, of course. But most of them have put their assets in a blind trust (i.e. NOT in the hands of their family members) to avoid it. As to how this compares with Clinton, those same government watchdog experts questioning Trump's family business setup were also asking questions about how Clinton as president would separate herself from her family's Clinton Foundation.

But the Clinton Foundation is a nonprofit. Trump's business is very much for profit, and it very much affects his personal wealth. And that underscores the dilemma Trump could be backing himself (and Hill Republicans) into: We've never before had a president with so many financial interests in so many countries. On top of that, we'll soon have a president who wants to have his family run those interests while simultaneously appearing to advise him on his presidency.

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Already, Trump's phone call with Taiwan's president was dissected not just for its geopolitical dominoes, but for its effect on his bottom line: Trump apparently considered hotel investments in Taiwan earlier this year. And Ivanka Trump's decision to hold a meeting on climate change with Al Gore (a meeting Trump participated in) raised eyebrows, given that she's supposed to be handling her father's financial interests as well.