Long before he became speaker of the House of Representatives, Paul Ryan had a simple dream: to play Jack Kemp to a future Republican president’s Ronald Reagan.
In a cruel twist of fate, Ryan instead had to reprise Kemp’s role with President Trump.
Kemp, Ryan’s idol, helped craft the tax cut that eventually became the centerpiece of Reagan’s supply-side economic agenda. From his early years representing a Wisconsin swing district in Congress, Ryan was unveiling sweeping budget and reform plans he hoped would someday become law.
Trump, for the most part, never embraced Ryan’s vision. The two have worked together better than ever seemed possible since the House speaker held out on endorsing Trump for president, even after his nomination was inevitable, or as Ryan waffled on his Trump support after the vulgar “Access Hollywood” tape leaked. But Trump has not become a convert on entitlement reform.
After the election results made them improbable governing partners, Ryan accepted the challenge. “Donald Trump heard a voice out in this country that no one else heard,” a starry-eyed Ryan said the next day. “He connected in ways with people no one else did. He turned politics on its head.”
“We will work hand-in-hand on a positive agenda to tackle this country’s big challenges,” he added. “We will honor the timeless principles that our country was founded on: liberty, freedom, free enterprise, consent of the governed, and we will apply those principles to the problems of the day.”
Since Ryan announced he was retiring from Congress, many have argued his Trump about-face was a dereliction of duty and black mark on his legacy.
“No one in the GOP was better equipped, by position and disposition alike, to resist Trump’s racially infused, insular nationalism, or to define a more inclusive competing vision for the party,” writes the Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein. “Instead, Ryan chose to tolerate both Trump’s personal excesses and his racially polarizing words and deeds as the price worth paying to advance Ryan’s own top priorities: cutting spending; regulations; and above all, taxes.”
Yes, it’s fair to say that Ryan swallowed his considerable misgivings about Trump to try and fulfill his dreams of presenting a Republican president a slew of conservative bills to sign into law. But there is something uncharitable about failing to recognize that Trump did not simply fall out of the sky. Republican voters nominated and elected him, even as many party leaders signaled with increasing desperation that they should not do so.
The fact that the Republican Party moved so rapidly from the leadership of Mitt Romney with Ryan as his sidekick to Trump should tell us that there was something deficient in the way the GOP was representing its own constituents.
Ryan has always represented the tension between his party’s aspirations versus its reality. He sought to move on from Kemp’s belief that tax cuts and growth would solve everything, instead guiding his party toward mathematically challenging, politically risky reforms aimed at helping the welfare state perform its core functions at a cost more consistent with America’s historic postwar federal tax burden.
On that front, Ryan made substantial progress. But he also voted for all the big-ticket spending items that, along with the economic downturn, blew up the debt under the last period of unified Republican control of the federal government. He joined with two Republican presidents to cut taxes and jack up defense spending without deficit reduction.
The tension was even greater on immigration, where Ryan’s sympathies were clearly with immigrants and the growing voting blocs Republicans would eventually need, but the party’s base — as in, its actual voters — disagreed with and distrusted his preferred policy solutions.
Much of the analysis critical of Ryan takes it for granted that he should have ignored his voters’ desires entirely. But this too seems to assume Trump was something that just happened, not a reaction to the Republican leadership’s legitimacy crisis with its own followers.
The Republican Party’s demographic crisis did not unfold after two decades of nominating Trump-like candidates. It happened as the party’s standard-bearers included Romney, John McCain, former President George W. Bush, and Bob Dole. Dole, unlike Barry Goldwater, voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — and picked one Jack Kemp as his running mate. The failure of the party to respond to its voters’ concerns while also reaching out to a larger slice of America is not entirely the product of a failure to try.
Ryan’s critics on the Right have always imagined they could have gotten the Democrats to agree to better spending deals. Now pundits suggest they could have done a better job wishing away the Republican primary electorate’s choice of Trump.
I’ll believe it when I see it.
