Back in the spring, when Paul Ryan persuaded him not to veto the massive omnibus spending bill, the president had been promised that his border wall money would come later that year. It was vitally important to get the increased funding for the military while they could, Ryan said. (The Speaker was joined in this lobbying campaign by a new Montana congresswoman, who told the White House that short-term spending bills were endangering troops’ lives. Her name was Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president and an heir to his interventionist foreign policy doctrine.)
Now, with Democrats preparing to take over the House majority, there was one last chance to get that money for the border wall. Instead, Ryan was going home—knowing full well that funding would never, ever materialize—and Trump was getting stiffed.
His wrath swelled as the day went on. Fuming that evening as he watched Freedom Caucus members rail on the House floor against the short-term funding bill, denouncing it as an affront to the president’s promises, Trump beckoned his advisers to the residence. He complained that Ryan had lied to him. Mulvaney was both inciting and sympathetic: The chief of staff knew what it was like to be strung along by the House leadership, told to live to fight another day only for that fight never to get picked. He encouraged Trump to stand his ground, to show Congress who was boss, to bend Washington to his will.
The tipping point was Laura Ingraham. Having tuned in to Fox News for her 9:00 p.m. show, the president was mortified listening to the exchange between Ingraham and Jordan as they discussed the dearth of a border wall.
“Jim Jordan, it is true, Congress hasn’t done its job on this particular issue,” she told him. “I think that not funding the wall is going to go down as one of the worst things to have happened to this administration—forget Mueller.”
A moment later, Ingraham aired a clip from Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show from earlier that day, in which Limbaugh compared Trump’s failure to build the wall to George H. W. Bush’s promise, “Read my lips: no new taxes.”
Then, Jordan put the cherry on top. “Four times we promised them that we would build the wall and put it in the spending bill, and now we’re saying, ‘Oh, no, we’re going to kick it to February, when Pelosi’s going to be Speaker,” he said. “It’ll never happen. We’ve got to do it now.”
As the president was watching, Meadows called yet again, urging Trump to issue a veto threat that would force Democrats to the negotiating table.
It was at least Meadows’s fourth call that day; the Freedom Caucus chairman was using an old trick, phoning Trump late at night while he was in the residence and away from staff, hoping to persuade him of decisions that White House aides disagreed with. On this count, it didn’t matter. Mulvaney and Meadows were on the same page. As they spoke, Trump threw his hands in the air, letting fly an impressive string of expletive-deleted remarks about Ryan and Mitch McConnell, wondering how such a gutless party had ever gained power before he came along.
Mulvaney was soon on the horn with Scalise, the House GOP’s designated vote-counter, warning him of the president’s tailspin. The majority whip quickly contacted both the Speaker and the House majority leader. He conveyed Mulvaney’s message and suggested that their plans to pass the stop-gap funding bill on Thursday might be derailed. Ryan and McCarthy did not share his concern. House Republicans, the two agreed, would not tolerate ending the year with a shutdown, especially after having been pummeled in the midterm elections.
As the Senate passed its short-term measure that night, kicking it over to the House for a vote the next afternoon, Ryan went to bed confident and content. It had been a most memorable day: Earlier, inside the Library of Congress, the Speaker had delivered his farewell address, capping his twenty-year congressional run. This was a part of his legacy-burnishing project, along with a widely lampooned six-part, taxpayer-funded video series documenting his career-long pursuit of tax reform.
The point of the speech was threefold. First, Ryan hoped to validate his contributions to the institution, portraying himself as a crusader who sinned only in challenging the status quo. “I acknowledge plainly that my ambitions for entitlement reform have outpaced the political reality, and I consider this our greatest unfinished business,” he said, noting nevertheless, “I am darn proud of what we have achieved together to make this a stronger and more prosperous country.”
Second, Ryan endeavored to elevate himself above the beleaguered state of American politics. He warned that “genuine disagreement” had given way to “intense distrust” in the age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles. “All of this gets amplified by technology, with an incentive structure that preys on people’s fears, and algorithms that play on anger,” he complained. “Outrage is a brand.”
Lastly, most implicitly but most important, the Speaker sought separation from the candidate whose impulses he’d combated and the president whose behaviors he’d ignored. Promising that “our problems are solvable if our politics will allow it,” Ryan did not mention Trump by name, yet worked methodically toward persuading the audience that he, Ryan, should not be remembered in the context of the forty-fifth president. “I knew when I took this job, I would become a polarizing figure. It comes with the territory,” Ryan said. “But one thing I leave most proud of is that I like to think I am the same person now that I was when I arrived.”
In the personal sense, this was true: Ryan was still the unfailingly polite, approachable, decent person he’d been all along, the guy House Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to dislike even as they accused his policies of killing Grandma.
In the political sense, however, Ryan’s self-portrait was a mirage. The truth was, he had come to Congress as a Jack Kemp conservative and would depart as a Donald Trump Republican.
It was more complicated than that, certainly. History requires shade and texture. But legacies are reductive by nature. And as the Speaker walked away, closing a messy and mesmerizing chapter in the party’s history, the harsh reality was that Ryan would be remembered more for enabling Trump’s mischief than for crafting a generational overhaul of the tax code.
It was a political obituary of the Speaker’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’s good guys, someone whose sense of principle and civility informed his objections to the man in the first place.
Back when he became Speaker, Ryan warned that the Republican Party’s internal fractures threatened to make legislating 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, certainly. Yet those internecine breakages had largely receded during Ryan’s tenure. The party had fallen in line behind Trump; there was no real power struggle within the GOP of 2017 and 2018. This meant that when historians got to asking the obvious questions—How did the party of fiscal sanity become the party of the historic spending increases? How did the party of family values become the party of “grab ’em by the pussy”? How did the party of compassionate conservatism become the party of Muslim bans?—the answers would implicate not just Trump but Ryan as well.