Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent at Politico Magazine.

Paul Ryan came to Congress as a Jack Kemp conservative and will depart as a Donald Trump Republican.

It’s more complicated than that, certainly. History requires nuance and texture. But legacies are reductive by nature. The House speaker announced his retirement Wednesday, closing a messy and mesmerizing chapter in the history of the Republican Party. And for the affable Wisconsin kid who moved to Washington a quarter-century ago, eager to make his mark on fiscal policy, the harsh reality is that he might be remembered more for accommodating the impulses of the 45th president than for crafting a generational overhaul of the tax code.


This is a political obituary of Ryan’s own writing. His silence in the face of Trump’s indignities—and his observance of “exquisite presidential leadership,” a line that will live in infamy—would be less remarkable had he not first established himself as one of Congress’ good guys, someone whose sense of principle and decency informed his objections to Trump’s candidacy in the first place. Indeed, the speaker’s habit of turning a blind eye to the president’s behavior is relevant and revelatory because it was not always so. There was hardly a tougher Trump critic during the 2016 campaign than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to combat the candidate’s dark rhetoric and the party’s nativist drift. Yet there has hardly been anyone softer on Trump since Election Day than Ryan, who felt duty-bound to deliver on the policy promises made to voters—and decided that doing so meant ignoring the ad hominem savaging of private citizens, the hush money paid to porn stars, the attacks on private companies, the attempts to delegitimize institutions and the innumerable other acts for which Barack Obama would have been impaled by the right.

This was “Paul’s deal with the devil,” a phrase used by several of the speaker’s confidants in the days following Trump’s shocking triumph. Reince Priebus, his old friend and the chairman of the Republican National Committee, had told Ryan on Election Day that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency, and Ryan was prepared to give a speech soon afterward divorcing himself—and the party—from Trump once and for all. Instead, the speaker found himself staring down a Faustian bargain. Republicans had seized total control of Washington. And he might, over the next two years, have a chance to pursue the legislation of his dreams: repealing Obamacare, rewriting the tax code, reforming entitlement programs and rebuilding the military. But it would be possible only if he partnered with the very man whose offenses were so manifest that Ryan disinvited him from his own Wisconsin congressional district a month before the election.

Their alliance turned out to be stronger than anyone in either camp could have anticipated. Ryan carefully avoided criticizing the president while offering frequent elementary tutoring sessions on policy and process behind closed doors, grumbling only to a handful of close friends about the task; Trump reciprocated the speaker’s restraint and spared him of the sort of public shaming doled out to other Republicans, including Senate leader Mitch McConnell. By this metric—and considering the two major triumphs of his tenure, tax reform and boosted military funding—some allies will argue that Ryan’s shotgun marriage with Trump, and his speakership on the whole, was a success. “Paul will go down in history as having achieved more in a shorter period of time than any speaker of the House,” Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the speaker’s longtime friend, told me.

But at what cost?



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Some Republicans feared that 2016 represented an existential crisis for the party—a struggle for its identity, its future. The speaker of the House was one of them. A disciple of Kemp—the happy warrior who carved out his niche in the GOP by promoting an upward mobility agenda in deprived communities—Ryan was alarmed by Trump from the moment he entered the race. He warned conservative allies that Trump was using “identity politics” to exploit white resentment toward the minority groups they needed to court. He told reporters that Trump’s verbal assault against a federal judge of Mexican heritage was “the textbook definition of a racist comment.” He reminded House colleagues that the boasts of groping women vindicated his longstanding concerns about Trump—and suggested they join him in abandoning their nominee. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump,” Ryan announced on a conference call with his fellow House Republicans in October 2016, after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape went public. “Not now. Not in the future.”

That seems like a lifetime ago. Ryan once dreamed of defeating Trump; he has since merely hoped to contain him. The gentleman from Wisconsin has spent the bulk of his speakership babysitting a president whose intemperate instincts and deficit of fundamental policy knowledge threaten to derail the party—and potentially the government and the country—at any moment. Ryan has grown weary of keeping watch. He confided to friends that while spending more time with family was the No. 1 motivator behind his exit, Trump fatigue was a close runner-up.

Trump won’t be Ryan’s problem for much longer. Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, the speaker’s top lieutenants, have been shadowboxing for months and officially touched gloves Wednesday morning in a private meeting aimed at facilitating unity. It won’t last. Election Day is seven long months away, and factions are already emerging as the two men jockey—among donors, lobbyists and their fellow members—for support as the next Republican leader. One thing is certain: As McCarthy and Scalise campaign to lead the House GOP, they will do so as Trump Republicans. It’s his party now, without question or caveat.

Ryan told me last fall that the fractures in the Republican Party threatened to make governing impossible. “We basically run a coalition government,” he complained, “without the efficiency of a parliamentary system.” This was the story of John Boehner’s speakership. But the truth is, those internecine breakages are not what they used to be. The GOP has largely fallen in line since Trump’s nomination and election. And that means when historians ask the obvious questions—How did the party of fiscal sanity become the party of the biggest spending increase in modern history? How did the party of family values become the party of “grab them by the pussy”? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans?—the answers will implicate not just Trump, but Ryan and other Republicans as well.

Politics are cyclical. The war for the future of the Republican Party will rage on. But in the short term, the battle for the GOP’s heart and soul is finished. Donald Trump won—and Paul Ryan will be remembered as both victim and accomplice.



***

Ryan probably does deserve a break, if not a bit of sympathy, for taking the worst job in politics at precisely the moment when his party was being hijacked by a cannibalistic insurgent.

From the moment he arrived in Washington—first as a college intern from Miami University in Ohio, and later as a waiter, think-tanker, Hill staffer and, ultimately, a member of Congress—Ryan had his sights on the House Ways and Means Committee. He had finally became chairman in early 2015, and it cannot be overstated just how sincerely Ryan loathed the idea of leaving that perch to become speaker of the House. Never in the modern era, and perhaps not in American history, has someone been dragged kicking and screaming into the most powerful position in Congress. It took weeks of frantic phone calls—from McCarthy, Priebus, Boehner, Mitt Romney, even Cardinal Timothy Dolan—to talk him into it, and even then he was reluctant. “Paul really didn’t want this job, although he accepted the fact that he had to do it. At the time, there was exactly one person in the Congress who could get 218 votes,” Boehner told me Wednesday morning. “And while I think he accepted the difficulty of being speaker, I’m not sure that he really enjoyed the job all that much.”

Ryan’s explanation for retiring—that he misses his family and doesn’t want to be a “weekend dad” anymore to his three teenagers—is genuine. But it can’t be considered in a vacuum. Indeed, one primary reason that Ryan wanted to remain Ways and Means chairman was because it required no weekend travel, no jet-setting and constant fundraising, no hassle of dealing with sex scandals and ethical breaches. Not only is the speakership miserable, but it’s brutal on family life. “I’ve never wanted to be speaker,” Ryan told me in 2014. “I know myself very well, and I know where I’m happy. I like spending my time on policymaking.”

This approach made all the sense in the world, both for personal and political reasons. His father was an alcoholic who died at 55; a teenage Ryan discovered him unresponsive at their Janesville home. Neither his grandfather nor his great-grandfather lived to see 60. “I think mortality weighs on him,” Bill Bennett, the former education secretary and an early political mentor to Ryan, once told me. “That’s the first question the doctor asks: ‘How old was your father when he died? How old was your grandfather?’”

In 2014, after a failed stint as Romney’s vice presidential nominee, Ryan had it all figured out. He would take over the Ways and Means Committee. He would serve the maximum of three terms as chairman. He would hopefully author an overhaul of the tax code. And then he would ride into the sunset, moving back to Janesville, where he would write books and editorials and maybe even someday cut the ribbon on a university’s public policy center in his namesake.

There were great expectations from the donor class for Ryan to seek the presidency, first in 2012 and then in 2016, but he never had interest. To understand Ryan is to accept the fact that he never schemed to occupy the Oval Office; any friend or foe who thought otherwise has misunderstood the scope of his ambitions. When a group of influential conservatives recruited him to run in 2012, Ryan laughed them off and told then-Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels that everyone was counting on him. When Romney and GOP megadonor Woody Johnson hosted a casting call for presidential hopefuls in Manhattan in the fall of 2014, Ryan snubbed the event—to Romney’s displeasure—because hunting season was opening and his kids needed licenses.

The Ryan clan is close-knit. The speaker is a sixth-generation resident of Janesville, as is his brother and best friend, Tobin, whose wife and kids live practically around the corner. They were all rocked by the 2012 vice presidential run and had no appetite for another national campaign in 2016. “It’s a question of, how do you get his ideas front and center?” Tobin told me in 2014, hinting at the pressure Paul was under to run for president. “Do you have to throw yourself into the 2016 mix to get those ideas across? That’s a big price to pay.”

There was another serious advantage to running Ways and Means—one that Ryan did not appreciate when he ascended to the speakership. A committee chairman can freelance in a way that a speaker of the House cannot, Ryan concluded, an observation he often shared with friends. In the context of the 2016 campaign, this meant criticizing Trump but never going so far as calling for him to step aside as the nominee (which Ryan contemplated doing after the “Access Hollywood” tape, and told friends he would have done if still a chairman). In the context of Trump’s presidency, this meant biting his tongue about controversies on a near-daily basis for the sake of keeping the peace among House Republicans—something that was never in his job description as a committee chairman.

Underlying those dynamics is the reality that Ryan was never fully trusted by the pro-Trump enthusiasts in his conference after that October 2016 conference call. Not only would public rebukes of the president hurt party unity, they would hurt his standing as speaker and undermine his ability to pass legislation. The “deal with the devil” could not be executed as a lukewarm proposition. Ryan, as the speaker, felt there was no room for half-measures.

“I think if he were still a chairman he would have spoken out much more,” says Pete Wehner, Ryan’s longtime friend and former boss at the Kemp think-tank Empower America. “He took his duties as speaker of the House seriously in terms of representing Republican voters. And he made a calculation that to get through the policies he cares about meant that he had to muzzle himself at certain times—many times—when it came to things that Trump said and did.” Wehner, who served in George W. Bush’s White House and is a prominent Trump critic, added: “Paul was in a very, very difficult position. His vision of conservatism is right now being eclipsed.”



***

There is nothing linear about the legacy Paul Ryan leaves behind in Washington. He is commonly thought of as a fiscal crusader because of his austere budget blueprints, but Ryan voted for everything from Medicare Part D to the auto and bank bailouts to the recent, cap-busting spending increase he muscled through Congress. He justified this year’s omnibus package by pointing to the sizable bump in military funding, but Ryan has never been known on Capitol Hill as a defense hawk. He says he is retiring with a sense of accomplishment, but Ryan’s GOP neither repealed Obamacare nor reformed entitlements, two pillars of the conservative agenda and two explicit promises long made to the donor class. He is infamous for budget proposals that would gut the social safety net, but Ryan has spent more time talking about poverty than any Republican I’ve ever covered—and maybe more than any Democrat, for that matter.

It’s easiest to think of Ryan’s career as a play in three acts. The first, from his initial election in 1998 until his vice presidential run in 2012. The second, from that 2012 campaign until Trump’s victory in November 2016. The third, from Trump’s election until Ryan’s retirement.

The second act was his most compelling. As a young rank-and-file member of the House, Ryan had earned a reputation for being studious and sincere—but also ideologically charged. This was the story of his Obama-era budgets, and also his talk of dividing the electorate into “makers and takers,” those who help the economy and those who leech off it. It was Ryan’s experience on the national stage with Romney—escaping the comfortable confines of Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District—that exposed him to widespread perceptions of Republican callousness and indifference, scaring Ryan straight and prompting him to write a book in which he apologized for the “makers and takers” rhetoric.

If this transformation seemed all too convenient, well, Bob Woodson thought so too. Woodson, a longtime community organizer and civil rights advocate, met Ryan at the tail end of the 2012 campaign at a poverty event in Cleveland. Ryan kept in touch, and some months after the campaign ended he reached out to Woodson asking for a tour of facilities around the country that help struggling people get back on their feet. It struck Woodson as a publicity stunt, but Ryan said he wanted no media present. Woodson was still skeptical. “And then every month, for about the next four years, we went to a different city, we met different groups, and he deepened his understanding of these people,” Woodson told me. “I witnessed a transformation in him. He’s traveled to more low-income black neighborhoods than any member of the Black Caucus that I know of.”

These experiences, in concert with the harsh lessons learned from 2012, were the catalyst for Ryan’s reinvention. He was unrecognizable when he returned to Congress after the defeat. Ryan talked differently, thought differently and voted differently, conspicuously breaking from the party’s right flank and speaking—often lecturing—about the need for the party to modulate its positions and expand its appeal among nontraditional Republican voters. He voted to raise the debt ceiling, break the sequester and reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. He also lampooned Ted Cruz and the other conservatives who shut down the government in the hopeless pursuit of defunding the Affordable Care Act.

All of this informed Ryan’s approach to taking over for Boehner in the fall of 2015. He had come to understand that the Republican Party was widely perceived to be not just cruel, but clueless. The new speaker aimed to address both vulnerabilities with a sweeping series of policy proposals, known as the “Better Way” agenda, which would articulate legislative solutions and wrap them in the sort of aspirational, inclusive messaging Kemp had once steeped Ryan in.

The culmination of these efforts, appropriately, was in January 2016—the month before Trump officially began his conquest of the GOP. In South Carolina, Ryan teamed with Senator Tim Scott to host a forum on poverty and upward mobility, using the high-profile event to highlight how Republicans were advancing ideas on how to address everything from minority unemployment to criminal justice reform. “Where did the party of Jack Kemp go? Is it still out there?” Senator Lindsey Graham wondered aloud to the audience. The answer, that day, appeared to be yes. The event was a hit. Many of the GOP presidential contenders joined Ryan and Scott on stage, speaking to a diverse crowd the likes of which I’ve never seen at a Republican event. Ryan told me the night before that Trump had been invited. But the future president didn’t show up.

Ryan tried to extend the second act with his defiance of Trump throughout the 2016 primary, even as it became clear that the Manhattan billionaire would become the Republican nominee. But it came to an abrupt ending with Trump’s defeat of Clinton. Ryan was no longer the leader of the party, and, in his view, there was no room for grandstanding. Either he was on board with the president, and with the unified Republican government, or he wasn’t. Which brought us to Act 3—Ryan’s overnight, whiplash-inducing transformation from Trump adversary to Trump enabler.

It’s this finale that has frustrated and disappointed some of the speaker’s friends and allies. They cringed watching him waste the goodwill he had earned. They worried that Trump’s recklessness, and the inevitable guilt by association, would come to define Ryan’s time in politics more than the policies he championed or the way in which he conducted himself. And they came to understand that history will likely be unsympathetic to Ryan’s predicament. “Paul had a responsibility to try and get as much done as he could with Trump as president, but also to control and contain the worst instincts of Trump. And that proved to be an impossible task,” Wehner said. “Did Paul do everything right? I’m sure he would say that he didn’t. I think it was an anguished time for him.”

In truth, it’s an anguished time for many in the GOP. Ryan is far from the only Republican to walk this tightrope, juggling grave concerns about Trump with the desire to keep the peace and achieve policy results, all while keeping their donors and constituents happy. It’s just that Ryan has a higher profile—and faces his reckoning with history sooner than others.

Jimmy Kemp, the son of Jack and a longtime friend to Ryan, equated the speaker’s departure to that of George W. Bush—someone whose popularity had diminished and who was criticized on the way out, he said, but who posterity will judge to have been dealt a particularly difficult hand. “In the future,” Kemp said, “I still think people will be known as Paul Ryan Republicans.”