I don't want anyone ever to say that I never supported El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago in his heroic effort to Make America Great Again. So I am here to say, "You go, Mr. President*." From CNN:

In a series of late-night tweets Thursday, Trump blasted Ryan. "Paul Ryan, the failed V.P. candidate & former Speaker of the House, whose record of achievement was atrocious (except during my first two years as President), ultimately became a long running lame duck failure, leaving his Party in the lurch both as a fundraiser & leader," Trump wrote on Twitter. "He had the Majority & blew it away with his poor leadership and bad timing. Never knew how to go after the Dems like they go after us. Couldn't get him out of Congress fast enough!" Trump said in another tweet.



I'm telling you, it's hard out there for a zombie-eyed granny starver.

At issue, of course, are remarks that Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House, made about the president* as recorded in Tim Alberta's already essential upcoming book, American Carnage. Like any sentient primate, Ryan was underwhelmed by the president*'s fitness for office. From the Washington Post:

Alberta reports that Trump berated Ryan over a 2018 spending bill because it didn’t include funding for his border wall but then said he would sign it if Ryan were to give him time to build suspense on Twitter. Ryan agreed and then publicly sang the president’s praises after the meeting.

When Trump one Saturday in early 2017 accused the Obama administration of tapping his phones during the election, he called Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to ask his opinion of the predawn tweet. A slumbering, confused Priebus opened his phone and then called Ryan, a fellow Wisconsinite and longtime ally. “Paul, what the hell is going on? What the hell is he talking about?”

Ryan woke up, read the tweet and burst into “maniacal, punch-drunk laughter.” Now out of office and trading in his power suits for a blue vest, Ryan is back to critiquing Trump in unflattering terms in conversations with Alberta, who writes the former speaker could not stand the idea of another two years with the president and saw retirement as an “escape hatch,” in Alberta’s words. “We’ve gotten so numbed by it all,” Ryan says. “Not in government, but where we live our lives, we have a responsibility to try and rebuild. Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example.”

“I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan recalls. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government . . . I wanted to scold him all the time.”

Oh, ZEGS, you...beast.

It’s all one Republican Party. Pool Getty Images

Of course, Ryan didn't do that, not because he is something of a gutless wonder, which he is, and not because he wants to run for president when the smoke clears, which he does, but because he was getting most of what he wanted. He got his abomination of a tax cut. He got the deregulations so beloved by his donor class. He got judges who will allow said donor class to pillage the American commonwealth almost at will. And, truth be told, in his career in public office, Paul Ryan did at least as much damage to the country as the president* has.

And there's the rub in all this, and a problem for the Never Trump crew which is currently engaged in trying to use the Democratic Party as a lifeboat away from the plague ship into which their own party transformed over the past four decades. It isn't going to be enough to say you're against Donald Trump. You have to turn against the policies and forces that made him inevitable. Chief among those policies is Paul Ryan's warped and laughable conception of a national economy, all those "budgets" he proposed that made actual economists fall down laughing and his fellow congresscritters hide behind the drapes when Ryan walked down the hall toward their offices. You have to throw away the magic asterisk and the Play-Doh math with which Ryan conjured up those budgets. That's the first of the 12 steps.

God be with you.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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