Regrets? Paul Ryan apparently has a few, according to excerpts of a new biography that were discussed in a Politico article. Ryan knows that he’s going to go down in history as a Trump enabler, he sees Trump’s impact on our civic values, and he’s not happy about either. He’s not throwing the big tax cut back, though.
It’s important to remember that everything could have been different, at least on paper. Trump could have put himself up for sale to either party and proposed genuinely populist policies, and the GOP could have treated him as a third party candidate with whom they would only make temporary alliances of convenience. That didn’t happen. Both completely embraced the other, and both are now stuck with each other, for worse.
Why did that happen? Part of it was just a lack of imagination, I suspect. But the biggest part simply was that the GOP cannot win elections without the assistance of his reactionary followers. There was no practical way for most GOP officeholders to treat Trump in a way that would offend about 40 percent of their voters, so they didn’t try. The rest is history.