The New Yorker:

It may well be that the impeachment votes in February of 2021 marked the last opportunity for the party of Lincoln to escape its fate as Trump’s purring lap dog.

 By John Cassidy

Last week, Paul Ryan, the former Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, did an online video interview in which he called Donald Trump a “populist, authoritarian narcissist.” Ryan’s comments produced the predictable reaction: a slew of headlines; an angry diatribe from a Trump spokesman (“Paul Ryan is a loser who left Congress in disgrace after he, along with Mitt Romney, failed miserably”); and then nothing. The political world rapidly moved on to the next controversy.

That’s how things work these days, but, as we prepare to move into a Presidential-election year with Trump seemingly poised to capture the G.O.P. nomination for a third time, it’s worth stopping to examine Ryan’s remarks, which went beyond his three-word zinger. Since retiring from Congress at the end of 2018, Ryan has kept a low profile, although he did briefly reappear in the news in 2019, when a book by the political writer Tim Alberta revealed that Ryan had said that Trump “didn’t know anything about government.” Mostly, Ryan seems to have been working on his bank balance. The interview last week was part of an event for Teneo, an international consulting firm that Ryan joined in 2020, and where he is now vice-chairman. He’s also a non-executive director of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation—the owner of Fox News—which paid him more than three hundred and thirty thousand dollars in cash and stock last year, and of SHINE Technologies, a privately owned company based in Ryan’s native Wisconsin.

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