Donald Trump sold out to Paul Ryan, not the other way around

I’m not a big Paul Ryan fan, but one particular kick in the pants the speaker of the House is getting on his way out the door is unfair. It’s simply not the case that he sold out to Donald Trump or compromised his principles in any way. If anything, it’s just the opposite — Trump abandoned his stated views on a wide range of policy issues in order to bring himself into close conformity with Ryan’s ideology and policy agenda.

Writers sending off Ryan, like Tim Alberta at Politico and Josh Barro at Business Insider, argue that the speaker’s career has had a tragic arc in which, in Albert’s words, “the battle for the GOP’s heart and soul is finished,” with Trump the victor and Ryan the loser.

The reality is the opposite. On substance, Trump has embraced Ryan’s vision of lower taxes on the rich and a stingier welfare state, even though he campaigned promising the opposite. Ryan has indulged Trump on a personal level without abandoning any of his longstanding policy views. It’s true that Ryan has had limited success in enacting his agenda, but the impediments there have uniformly been in the United States Senate, not the White House. If anything, the Trump administration is quite loyally plugging away at Ryan-esque goals that the president never articulated as a candidate.

But while it’s unquestionably true that the self-presentation of the GOP in 2018 and beyond looks a lot more like what Trump was doing in 2015 than what Ryan was up to three years ago, the policy agenda of the GOP hews much closer to Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” blueprint than to anything Trump said as a candidate.

The critique now, ironically, is rooted in the same style-over-substance pathologies that led so many journalists to overrate Ryan for so long — an inclination Ryan was shrewd to exploit. He is a substance guy who, as he told the Atlas Society in 2005, got into public life because of the inspiration he drew from Ayn Rand and who believes that “almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill ... usually comes down to one conflict: individualism vs. collectivism.” He’s never sold out on those core views and instead got Trump to swing over to his side on many key topics.

Political obituaries for Paul Ryan paint him as a sellout

Politico’s Alberta in a very sympathetic political obituary titled “The Tragedy of Paul Ryan” starts with the premise that he “came to Congress as a Jack Kemp conservative and will depart as a Donald Trump Republican.”

Barro, in a more scornful take for Business Insider, argues that “the great tragedy of Paul Ryan is not that he sold his soul to Donald Trump. It’s that he got so little in return.”

It’s true, of course, that relatively little of Ryan’s expansive policy agenda — which centered on privatizing and cutting Medicare while block-granting and cutting all means-tested social assistance — has been enacted during Trump’s time in office. But virtually none of that failure is because Trump opposed Ryan’s ideas or because Ryan sold out those ideas.

A bill subjecting Medicaid to block grants and swinging cuts, the American Health Care Act of 2017, passed the US House of Representatives with the enthusiastic endorsement of Trump and his whole administration. This idea died (in favor of the “skinny repeal” scheme) due to opposition from Republican senators from Medicaid expansion states. Skinny repeal died later primarily because nobody actually thought it was a good idea (though for a bill that nobody would defend on the merits, it came shockingly close to passing).

Block-granting the rest of the welfare state was abandoned as a GOP policy priority not because of Trump, but because Doug Jones beat Roy Moore and cut the GOP Senate majority so razor-thin that it didn’t make sense to try to move more controversial partisan bills.

The Trump White House is, however, doing whatever it can through administrative fiat to make social assistance programs stingier, primarily by imposing work requirements.

There’s a lot that’s happening in Donald Trump’s Washington that wouldn't be happening if Marco Rubio or Scott Walker were president. But on the particular passion points of Ryan’s career — cutting taxes on the rich and cutting spending on the poor — the executive branch is doing its best. They are having limited success getting this done for the same reason that Nancy Pelosi couldn’t get Congress to pass a cap-and-trade bill when she was speaker — getting big laws through the Senate is hard — not because Trump is standing in the way. Even though Trump’s campaign promised in many ways to do just that.

Donald Trump sold out to Paul Ryan

Yet if you took Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign seriously (and recall that at the time, Trump supporters were constantly urging us to take him seriously rather than literally), you would have predicted that Trump would emerge as a major impediment to Ryan and Ryanism.

Candidate Trump promised to avoid cutting Medicaid. Candidate Trump promised to deliver affordable health insurance to all Americans — at government expense, if necessary. Candidate Trump promised to defend Social Security benefits. Candidate Trump said that wealthy people like Donald Trump would pay higher taxes under his plan. Candidate Trump positioned himself as an enemy of global financial elites and vowed to reimpose Glass-Steagall regulation and break up big banks.

Candidate Trump, in other words, promised to deliver cultural revanchism not as a complement to traditional Regan-style small government economics but as a substitute for it.

His campaign was so heterodox on policy that it was commonplace to predict at the time, including this widely cited Lee Drutman article at Vox, that it would lead to a wholesale realignment of the party system. Instead, as Christopher Baylor wrote more recently for Vox, the post-Trump GOP turns out to look broadly similar to the pre-Trump GOP.

And that’s because Ryan very tenaciously declined to sell out to Trump. Working with his longtime friend and former colleague Mike Pence, Ryan staffed the middling ranks of the Trump administration with a bevy of very orthodox conservative Republicans. The stalwart House right-winger Mick Mulvaney was installed at the Office of Management and Budget, and though Tom Price (another House conservative) was eventually forced out as health and human services secretary, he was in place for the crucial Obamacare repeal drama. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and other financial regulators are all solid conservatives, as are the people overseeing all the key social welfare programs at agencies ranging from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to the Department of Agriculture.

Trump, of course, is pursuing his personal passion projects in the fields of being mean to immigrants and mucking around with trade policy. But Ryan is not actively pushing for legislation to restrict immigration and certainly isn’t pushing legislation to restrict trade, while Trump’s administration is diligently — albeit somewhat joylessly — pursuing Ryan’s policy agenda.

Ryan made a reasonable choice about Trump

The impression that Ryan has in some sense “sold out” stems largely from the sense that it was wrong, morally speaking, of Ryan to have done so much to indulge Trump’s racism, his corruption, and his authoritarianism.

I, personally, think those are bad things to indulge.

But unlike Paul Ryan, I’m not a fanatical opponent of the welfare state who views American politics as an apocalyptic twilight struggle between the forces of individualism and collectivism.

Ryan, by contrast, believes in Paul Ryan’s ideas (ideas that, to be clear, are wrong and bad — in reality, helping people is good), and so he faced some tough choices around Trump. Back during the 2016 campaign when Ryan thought Trump was going to lose, he kept him at arm’s length. Alberta even reports that Ryan had a specific plan in place to respond to Trump’s loss by pretending to have been sorry about backing him and “give a speech soon afterward divorcing himself — and the party — from Trump once and for all.”

Instead, Trump won the election. At that point, Ryan could have exercised his constitutional obligation to try to check Trump’s corruption and racism and authoritarianism. But had he done so, Trump might have stuck to his original positions on policy. That would have ensured that the cuts Ryan favored didn’t pass and would even raise the prospect of Trump cutting deals with Democrats to expand the welfare state. Alternatively, Ryan could try to indulge Trump’s corruption and racism and authoritarianism in exchange for gaining Trump’s adherence to Ryan’s policy agenda.

Ryan made the play, and it worked. Even as Ryan himself fades from the scene, Mulvaney is doing his level best to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, work requirements are getting slapped onto Medicaid, Iowa is making it harder to sign up for Affordable Care Act plans, and Scott Pruitt is doing everything in his power to make it easier for companies to pollute the air and water.

A lot of people who find Ryan likable on a personal level are horrified by the chaos Trump is unleashing on other fronts and relatively unimpressed with the idea that making it harder for poor kids to get food and health care offsets the damage. But that just goes to show how poorly understood Ryan remains, even by some of his biggest fans.