Less than a year after former House Speaker Paul Ryan ignominiously slunk out of Congress to recede back into the Wisconsin landscape like a dopey cornstalk, President Donald Trump is attacking Ryan—the man who helped deliver the president’s crowning achievement of screwing over poor people. You hate to see it!
In a series of late night tweets on Thursday, Trump blasted his former congressional frenemy as a “failure” with “poor leadership,” who “didn’t know how to Win.”
As a reminder, here’s what Trump had to say about Ryan a year ago, when he announced his retirement from Congress.
What could have prompted the president’s painfully predictable about-face on Ryan? It appears Trump was responding to newly published excerpts from Politico journalist Tim Alberta’s forthcoming book, American Carnage, in which Ryan recalls his MAGA bootlicking by explaining:
“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.”
Alberta got in on the action by sharing a gif of a cat.
Ryan, meanwhile, has yet to publicly respond to Trump’s attacks. I can only assume he’s too busy furiously pumping iron while misunderstanding Rage Against the Machine to care.