All the Republican Bootlickers Who Decided to Love Trump

There’s no time like the present to shit on Paul Ryan.

The Washington Post has a report out today on American Carnage, a forthcoming book from Tim Alberta that details the turmoil in the Republican Party under President Donald Trump. Complete with reporting dating back to before the 2016 election, Alberta very much got The Goods, in the sense that he’s got first-hand quotes from Trump saying things like how he loves Christianity not so much for that Jesus guy but for all the Evangelical votes he got.

Alberta also apparently has pages and pages exhaustively detailing repeated instances of one-time Never-Trump Republicans eating absolute shit just to cling to power. It’s bad and horrifying—these are the people running our government, after all—but it also makes plain the spinelessness of each and every card-carrying member of the GOP establishment member when presented with any sort of Trump-related conflict. Let’s take a look, shall we?

The Post—which obtained a copy of the book before it’s published next week—opened its recounting of Alberta’s work with the account of Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s executive assistant in the Oval Office. Alberta reports that Westerhout was “inconsolable” the night of the 2016 election; now, Westerhout reportedly says she do almost anything for Trump, who calls her “my beautiful beauty.”

It picks up steam from there, presenting acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s 2016 comments to Alberta in which he said that, “we’re not going to let Donald Trump dismantle the Bill of Rights,” and bemoaned how the GOP was categorized as racist under President Barack Obama for its constant investigations (and birtherism).

Three years later, Alberta reports that Mulvaney goes around saying that he’s fine to let “Trump be Trump.”

Rep. Jim Jordan reportedly told Alberta in 2016 that he wished Congress could have managed to “avoid creating this environment that was conducive to someone like Donald Trump becoming the nominee.” Here’s Jordan last month:

Cruz—an asshat who, along with Heidi, his wife, was repeatedly attacked by Trump in the primaries—reportedly told his friends that there was “no way in hell” he would subjugate himself to Trump in front of the nation, adding “history isn’t kind to the man who holds Mussolini’s jacket.”

Fast forward a few months, and there was Cruz, front and center, holding the jacket.

Ryan, being the slimy faux-wonk he is, was more than happy to talk shit about Trump with Alberta following his decision not to seek reelection in 2018. Ryan bemoaned the fact that “we’ve gotten so numbed by it all,” proceeding to list a boring set of purported American ideals that Trump works against—“Don’t call a woman a ‘horse face.’ Don’t cheat on your wife. Don’t cheat on anything. Be a good person. Set a good example.” Ryan then set in on Trump’s legislative wit, claiming it to be nonexistent and using that as an excuse for his bootlicking.

“I told myself I gotta have a relationship with this guy to help him get his mind right,” Ryan recalls. “Because, I’m telling you, he didn’t know anything about government . . . I wanted to scold him all the time.”

According to Albert, in an interview with the president, Trump called Ryan “a fucking Boy Scout.” You hate to see any positive praise of our current president, but you gotta hand it to him on this one: He thoroughly flamed every single one of these conservative dickheads and got the bottom of his boots cleaned.

(Update: You do not, under any circumstance, “gotta hand it to him.”)