If it wasn't Paul Ryan, you could almost feel sorry for him.
WASHINGTON — Speaker Paul D. Ryan, chairman of the Republican National Convention, recent vice-presidential candidate and the highest elected Republican in the country, has one goal for this year: to form a conservative policy agenda for the Republican presidential nominee to embrace.
If that nominee is Donald J. Trump, that may be a waste of time.
Panicked Republicans question whether Mr. Trump will be able to unite a Republican-controlled Congress that would normally be expected to promote and promulgate his agenda, an internal crisis nearly unheard-of in a generation of American politics. On nearly every significant issue, Mr. Trump stands in opposition to Republican orthodoxy and his party’s policy prescriptions—the very ideas that Mr. Ryan has done more than anyone else to form, refine or promote over the last decade.
Never mind that Ryan is basically a fraud, and that all of his policy prescriptions utterly hollow. Where they exist (cough, healthcare, cough) they are unworkable—think about all those years of budgets he created in which the numbers simply didn't add up. So it's not actually like anything exists for Trump to be in opposition to, policy-wise. But if it makes Paul Ryan's life even harder—well, who deserves it more?
There's also this, which is too fun not to include:
Though most in the Republican establishment are hoping for the dust to settle and for Senator Marco Rubio to emerge as their nominee—his Capitol Hill endorsements stack up daily—some still murmur privately that in the event of Mr. Trump’s nomination, they would like to see Mr. Ryan emerge as a brokered nominee at the Republican National Convention in July.
I'm sure that's going to work out just as well for them as putting all their eggs in the Rubio basket.