Approximately two seconds after Paul Ryan endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy for office, people began asking what it would take for the House Speaker to dump the former Apprentice host. And, of course, they’re still waiting. Ryan grumbled, but didn’t demur after the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Even after Trump revealed on national television that he’d fired James Comey because he was sick and tired of the F.B.I. director investigating his campaign, potentially handing his own articles of impeachment to Lester Holt and any Democrats who happened to be watching, Ryan would only offer, “He‘s just new to this.”

It’s not hard to divine why. As a leader of the Grand Old Party, Ryan’s practically contractually obligated to prioritize tax cuts over just about anything else. That’s probably also why, despite the many, many obstacles facing comprehensive tax reform happening anytime soon, Ryan was practically shuddering with enthusiasm Tuesday as he delivered a speech promising that the G.O.P.’s much-anticipated tax-reform bill would materialize any minute. He spoke with so much passion about the topic that you might have thought he was talking about civil rights.

“The defenders of the status quo—and there are many of them—they’re counting on us to lose our nerve, to fall back, or to put this off altogether,” Ryan said during a speech to the National Association of Manufacturers in Washington. “But we will not wait for a path free of obstacles. Guess what? It does not exist.”

Unsurprisingly, Ryan did not go into detail about said obstacles, which The Wall Street Journal notes are manifold and include: the necessity of passing “a budget that allows [Republicans] to use reconciliation, the procedural tool that enables a simple majority vote in the Senate”; “a pile of narrower issues that will crop up as Republican members find their home-state and home-district industries objecting to pieces of the tax bill”; a lack of any consensus around how the G.O.P. might pay for the legislation; and that minor issue of health care, which will need to get done before moving on to taxes.

Meanwhile, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn said Tuesday that the White House will send a tax bill to Congress within the first two weeks of September, which might come as a surprise to anyone who was listening when Trump said earlier this month that his tax bill was already “moving along in Congress” and “doing very well.” According to Cohn, Trump is even taking time out of his busy schedule of tweeting and watching cable TV for hours on end to inquire with Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on the progress. The president “could not be more excited about what we’re doing,” Cohn told CNBC. “One of us—if not both of us—gets a call every day and sometimes more than one a day, asking us how tax reform is coming,” Cohn told CNBC.

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Former Barclays executives may be in trouble

This doesn’t sound great: