This week on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, the political late night host devoted a long segment to examining Representative Paul Ryan’s sycophancy, introducing her denunciation of the Speaker of the House by first talking about notions of “loyalty” within the Trump administration.
Citing KellyAnne Conway’s statement that Trump supported National Security Advisor Michael Flynn out of loyalty — something Conway emphasized repeatedly when talking with Matt Lauer about the Flynn charade — William Saletan recently wrote for Slate that “loyalty within Trump’s circle is more important than loyalty to country.” It’s not a hard conclusion to draw, given, well, just about everything Trump’s done, and everyone Trump’s appointed to his Cabinet thus far. Bee’s take echoed a similar sentiment, launching into her Ryan-attack first by discussing Conway’s rhetoric, and how it boils down to crony v. national loyalty. Bee began, with a photo of Trump taking his oath of office:
When Donald Trump put his hand on those two Bibles and swore to preserve, protect, and defend a mendacious Kremlin-stroking nutbag who would wreck America’s national security apparatus in the span of a few weeks, he meant it. Loyalty is everything to him, and nobody has adapted to that reality better than Speaker of the House and faithful husky Paul Ryan.
From there, Bee launched into the history of how Ryan’s been perceived and projected by pundits as the “conscience” and “intellectual” core of the Republican Party, to which she responds, “in today’s Republican party, that’s kind of like saying Moe is the smart stooge.”
She then traces how whatever “conscience” Ryan may have been perceived to have has been wholly compromised by his one guiding principal: the President— seemingly no matter who they are — should not be a Democrat. She thereafter compares his former condemnation of Trump’s extreme campaign ideas like the Muslim ban with his happy acquiescence to them now that he and Trump are both collaborators in omnipotence. She notes that this is all especially concerning in light of all of the news regarding Russia’s potential ties to the Trump administration, since Ryan is the most powerful person in the Congressional chamber that bears the sole power to impeach.
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