House Speaker Paul Ryan is catching another break from the traditional media, which has consistently and doggedly overlooked the fact that the Republicans’ golden boy is actually a bit of a fraud and that he is part and parcel of a party which has lost its collective mind. Because now there's a convenient scapegoat to blame for Ryan's inability to lead: Donald Trump. For example, this story from the Washington Post, which proclaims that Trump is "ruining Paul Ryan's speakership."
When he was drafted into the speaker’s chair four months ago, Ryan acknowledged the job would be difficult. But, thanks to Trump, it has become much worse than that. He has come to embody the party establishment’s existential conflict: deeply wary of Trump’s divisive antics but reluctant to reject him entirely. […]
Prudence, however, has gotten Ryan only so far politically. The expected complications of managing the House Republican majority have only been compounded by Trump’s unexpected endurance. Ryan’s attempts to sail above the presidential fray with an emphasis on big ideas and basic legislating have been undermined both by hard-line House conservatives and by an angry presidential front-runner who all but mocks the reverence for the party’s leading “ideas man.” […]
House conservatives, meanwhile, are making it all but impossible for Ryan to strike a GOP consensus on spending, setting the stage for the same type of contentious year-end budget negotiations that bedeviled his predecessor, John A. Boehner.
Here's what the Post is failing to mention: Ryan is a hard-line conservative. His so-called "big" policy ideas are drawn from the same playbook the tea party is using—cut taxes and decimate social spending to ultimately cripple and destroy government. The only argument they have is over how quickly to dismantle it. Dissatisfaction with the unkept promises of Ryan and his merry band of nihilists is one of the things driving Trump's candidacy.
When it all comes crashing down on Ryan—when he can't get his raucous caucus to agree to a budget and has to have a last-minute government shutdown fight, when he has to turn to Nancy Pelosi again to save the GOP's bacon and keep government functioning, when he loses the support of the hardliners because he did that—it's all going to be blamed on Donald Trump. So at least he's got that going for him.