“He was the great budget reformer,” Charlie Sykes, a former Wisconsin radio host and friend of Ryan’s who broke with him over the election of Donald Trump, said. “He was the guy that got the Republican Party to take entitlement reform and debt reduction seriously.”

When Republicans won back the House majority on a wave fueled by the Tea Party uprising, it looked like that fiscal blueprint might be Paul Ryan’s legacy. But his own star rose faster than his policy platform. When Mitt Romney tapped Ryan as his running mate, he adopted the image of the earnest conservative wonk more than he did the proposals—voucherizing Medicare and block-granting Medicaid—that had made him famous to begin with. And when Ryan bowed to pressure from his colleagues to replace John Boehner as speaker, he gave up a post he considered his dream job—chairman of the Ways and Means Committee—to lead a divided Republican conference through a time of internal crisis.

The next year, Ryan worried that the election of Hillary Clinton in 2016 would doom his fiscal vision for another four years, and some of his allies in the House and in Wisconsin wondered if he would leave soon if and when she won. But it was a Republican president who ultimately cemented the party’s shift away from Ryan-style conservatism.

“The election of Donald Trump essentially ended any prospect of spending reform along those lines,” Sykes told me. “And I think there was probably a long period of denial and a long period of negotiation and then a long period of coming to grips with the reality that is Donald Trump’s party, not Paul Ryan’s party.”

After distancing himself from—and occasionally, if mildly, criticizing—the unconventional Republican nominee, Ryan made what his critics saw as a Faustian bargain with Trump as president: The speaker largely overlooked Trump’s intemperate tweets, his bashing of immigrants, and his tolerance of racism in exchange for the president’s signature on conservative policy victories.

That uneasy alliance helped secure Ryan’s lone legacy achievement—a $1.5 trillion tax cut that contained the most far-reaching changes to the code in more than 30 years. But even that legislation fell short of what Ryan had long envisioned. Though it slashed the corporate rate from 35 percent to 21 percent and began to limit costly deductions, it did little to simplify or flatten the code, and the tax cuts for individuals will all expire after seven years.

Addressing reporters on Wednesday, Ryan proclaimed himself pleased with his tenure. He touted the tax bill and noted that under his leadership, the House did pass significant entitlement reform—the repeal of the Affordable Care Act that included $800 billion in cuts to Medicaid. The measure died in the Republican-controlled Senate.

“I have accomplished much of what I came here to do,” Ryan said.