Less than a decade removed from the street protests that lit the party’s populist fuse, scores of Republicans from that hard-charging 2010 class voted for more spending, more debt, and more government—without fear of consequence.
To their credit, some of the only lawmakers who lobbied Trump against the bill were House conservatives. In fact, the opposition campaign waged by the likes of Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows was so effective that Trump came to fear that the bill represented a betrayal of his base, what with its massive spending increases, barely any of which was for border security and none of which was going to the construction of the wall he had been promising. They urged him to veto the legislation.
On Thursday, March 22, the House of Representatives voted to approve the 2,232-page package less than twenty-four hours after GOP leaders unveiled it. The reason it passed? Republicans loaded the bill with record amounts of military spending to buy off defense hawks, and Democrats piled on generous increases to domestic discretionary programs to placate progressives. Freedom Caucus members, hoping to turn the president against the bill, complained to him that it did not provide funding to build his border wall and that it failed to defund Planned Parenthood, risking blowback from social conservatives. Buying these arguments, the president decided he would veto the spending bill—even though it would mean a government shutdown within forty-eight hours.
Catching wind of this, John Kelly, the chief of staff, called Ryan and urged him to get to the White House, pronto. The Speaker arrived to find Trump in the East Wing residence. Fully briefed on the Freedom Caucus’s efforts, Ryan and Kelly arranged for the White House to block incoming phone calls from Jordan and Meadows. Then, the Speaker sat down with the president and launched into an urgent defense of the spending bill: It provided the major funding increase for military personnel and operations that he had long sought, and in order to secure that victory, Republicans had to give Democrats concessions in order for the bill to pass the Senate.
Trump wasn’t satisfied. Namely, he wanted to know, where was his money for the border wall? Ryan told the president that they were getting a down payment, roughly $1.5 billion, and that they would get more later. A veto of the legislation, he warned, would only set them back.
Trump still wasn’t convinced. He told Ryan he would probably veto the legislation. The Speaker exploded in anger, and a yelling match ensued. When each man had uncorked on the other—cathartic, surely, for them both—Trump told Ryan he would sign the bill on one condition: that Ryan give him room to build the suspense on Friday morning before announcing his blessing later in the day.
Sure enough, the next morning, Trump tweeted, “I am considering a VETO” and complained that his “BORDER WALL” was not being fully funded. By afternoon he was signing the spending bill at the White House, even as he called it “crazy,” insisted that “nobody read it,” and promised, “I will never sign another bill like this again.”
Passage of the giant spending package signaled a defeat for the forces of small-government austerity that had been ascendant in the years predating Trump. It also completed an evolution within Ryan’s own career. Once the party’s most celebrated fiscal conservative, the Speaker had found religion on defense spending after his experience on the national ticket in 2012. He returned to Congress determined to help rebuild the military, even if it meant further ballooning the debt and the deficit. Ryan could find ways to rationalize his 2003 vote for the Medicare prescription drug benefit, or for the TARP bailout in 2008, but with his championing of the 2018 omnibus package the Speaker had willfully forfeited his reputation as a fiscal hawk.
This, on top of watching him turn a blind eye to Trump’s ignominies, was too much for Ryan’s friends and allies around Washington to bear. The Speaker’s career was unfolding like a play in three acts. The first, from his election to Congress in 1998 until his vice-presidential run in 2012, starred the pushy, unpledged ideologue. The second, from that 2012 campaign until Trump’s victory in November 2016, featured a more seasoned, mature legislator who sought compromise where necessary and felt obligated to enhance the party’s image.
The third act, from Trump’s election until Ryan’s retirement from Congress, would not offer the happy ending he had once envisioned. His legacy would be defined by the fulfilment of a Faustian