By the time Mitt Romney selected him to be his running mate in 2012, Paul Ryan (then chairman of the House Budget Committee) had already cultivated a reputation within Washington’s political press corps of an earnest, well-meaning numbers guy. Ideological? Sure, maybe, but not at the expense of mathematic and analytic truth.

There were, to be clear, many problems with that depiction, but his ability to burnish it over the years in the face of facts (an anti-poverty crusader whose policies would strip health insurance from millions?) has been the hallmark of his career.

Yet for a brief moment that election summer, the Ryan mythos fell into doubt. In accepting his party’s nomination for the vice presidency, Ryan delivered a speech riddled with easily checked falsehoods and exaggerations. At a moment when reporters were scrutinizing him more closely than ever before, finding questionable assertions and padded resume lines, Ryan needed to play his convention speech unusually straight. Instead, among other things, he blamed President Barack Obama for the shuttering of a GM plant in his district that shut down before Obama took office, and for the failure of a fiscal policy commission that Ryan personally sabotaged.

Obviously the damage Ryan did to himself with his most powerful fanbase wasn’t permanent. It didn’t even last very long. But at least the political press corps took notice, and said something.

President Donald Trump has discovered, perhaps unwittingly, how to hack the Ryan problem. Where Ryan has built himself up as an honest, poised man of substance, Trump not only has never pretended to these particular virtues, he has delighted in demonstrating their political uselessness.