Some talking heads on the tube found it befuddling that Paul Ryan was maintaining a studious silence concerning a policy that many find cruel and unusual, separating parents and their children at the border. I’m only a scribbling finger, but it didn’t surprise me.

Ryan’s tenure as Speaker of the House has been characterized by no profiles in courage, rather slavish parroting of Trump era prejudices. The last time he spoke ill of Trump was during the campaign, not since he has assumed power.

Ryan tried to fire the House chaplain for a heretical prayer asking that lawmakers make efforts to see that “there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.”

He has failed to prevent House members like Devin Nunes of the Intelligence Committee from undermining the separation of powers by acting as tools of the White House to prevent investigation of Russian interference in the 2018 election.

His confused defenders claim he was once a nice fellow and that having announced his retirement at the and of the present term ought to free him to do his duty and preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. He has literally nothing to lose by speaking up.

I found this naiveté laughable. Ryan has often seemed an innocuous budget nerd, but his gospel has always been tilted more toward Mammon than toward God. He is a ruthless acolyte not of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John, but of Ayn Rand. He is 180 degrees from the egalitarian, compassionate faith of the present head of his ostensible church, Pope Francis.

By their fruits you shall know them. His faith has always been in supply side economics, cutting taxes and the government programs they pay for. He believes those rich enough to donate to the party deserve to prosper and to do onto their poorer brethren whatever they can get away with.

Since he’s still got six more months left, in which to jam through more legislation to aid the deserving rich and increase the burden on the undeserving poor, he can ill-afford to risk the chance by speaking out against Trump’s war on immigrants or any other atrocity the administration hatches. As Sen. Corker said, no one dares to poke the bear.

Ryan’s silence on his president’s lunatic anti-free enterprise assault on global trade alliances that have enriched Republican donors seems more peculiar at first. But in fact, Ryan has got plenty to lose by standing on principle, even the principle of libertarian greed.

Why? Because Ryan has never had a job that wasn’t political since working at McDonalds and driving the Oscar Mayer wienermobile as a student. Thereafter, he was an intern for his home state senator, then a legislative aide, a speechwriter for Jack Kemp’s libertarian propaganda shop, the legislative director for far right Congressman Sam Brownback (who later proved supply side economics a fantasy when he enacted it and ruined the economy of Kansas as governor). And of course, his twenty years in the House.

What he’s got to lose by crossing Trump is gainful employment beginning in January when he’ll be out of a government job for the first time since he was 22. Once, he could have looked forward to a lucrative chance to cash in as a lobbyist, think tank propagandist, or Fox News analyst. But times have changed.

Ryan will be a retired, ineffectual, timid, former speaker who left government voluntarily because he feared angry Janevillians might just throw him out for failing to take care of their economic well-being. He’s damaged goods, especially since his brand of optimistic, peppy Reagan and Kemp era delusion is a far cry from the dark zealotry of the American carnage, isolationism, anti-trade, anti-immigrant, nativist, detention camp, dictator-embracing party of Trump.

By saying nothing, by offending no one, by favoring expediency over morality, opportunism over principle, Ryan may be keeping his options open but at a high cost in reputation and self-respect. Especially since he is never going to fit in with the Bannonite, pitchfork-wielding crowd.

And he’s far from alone. If history remembers Ryan and his generation of Republicans, it won’t be as patriots but as enablers of the destruction of the same institutions they claim in their campaign ads to revere. And all to give a tax cut to billionaires who didn’t need it, the same people who outsourced the jobs whose loss fed the rage of voters who gave us President Trump. This is the House that Ryan built.