On Tuesday night, House speaker Paul Ryan was asked during a Fox News appearance about Donald Trump’s deeply misleading comment that Saddam Hussein was good at killing terrorists. “Tonight at a rally, Donald Trump said, ‘Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, but he was very, very good at killing terrorists,'” Megyn Kelly said to Ryan, as a look of incredulity flashed over Ryan’s face. “Any thoughts from you on the praise he had for Hussein?”
“He was one of the 20th century’s most evil people,” Ryan replied. “He committed mass genocide against his own people with chemical weapons.”
As Ryan said back in March, he would speak out against Donald Trump when he saw “episodes where conservatism is being disfigured” or “comments that mislead the people as to who we are as Republicans.” But at his Thursday morning press conference, Ryan said that Trump had been taken out of context. “He put it all into context,” Ryan said when asked he was satisfied with Trump’s explanation of his remarks about Hussein. “We get taken out of context all the time. I think his point was to put it all into context. So people understood the context in which he was speaking about getting tough on terrorism. I think that’s basically what it was, and he used colorful language to do that.”
So when Trump said Saddam Hussein was good at killing terrorists he was really just “speaking about getting tough on terrorism”?
Does that make any sense? Nope. Does Ryan really believe that? That’s hard to believe.
Trump made a very specific claim–that Hussein was “so good” at killing terrorists–and that claim undermines the decision of Ryan and other elected officials to authorize war against Iraq. As Stephen F. Hayes reported, Trump’s remark was blatantly untrue, but Republicans have done little this week to inform the American people of that fact.
John McCain, a staunch war supporter, had nothing to say about Trump’s remark. “I have my own work to do, and my own campaign to run. I’m not paying attention to the back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump,” McCain told THE WEEKLY STANDARD on Wednesday. “I’m sorry, I have nothing more to talk about that.”
“No comment,” said Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, an Iraq war veteran.
“I’m in the middle of trying to get two legislative projects done and I’m about to go chair a hearing, and all the press wants to talk about is Donald Trump,” said Ohio senator and former Bush administration official Rob Portman. “I don’t know about it. I haven’t followed it at all.”
The silence of many Republicans in response to Trump’s remarks about Hussein may be disappointing, but it’s hardly surprising. Most elected Republican party officials stood by silently when Trump said at a GOP debate in February that George W. Bush and members of his administration knowingly lied about weapons of mass destruction in order to launch the war. As Jonathan V. Last wrote at the time, Trumpism corrupts.
