Hey, remember Paul Ryan? The vaunted big brain of the conservative GOP? The House Speaker who forged a devil’s pact with Trump but bailed on his job in the midterm blue wave of 2018?

What a laugh it was yesterday to see him surface anew on ABC News, telling us how bad Trump is. Alas, something quite fundamental was missing from his critique. I bet you can spot it:

“What we now know, it’s pretty clear is, with Trump we lose…It’s just evidence. We lost the House in ’18. We lost the presidency in ’20. We lost the Senate in ’20. And now, in 2022, we should have and could have won the Senate. We didn’t. And we have a much lower majority in the House because of that Trump factor…We get past Trump, we start winning elections. We stick with Trump, we keep losing elections…I am a never-again Trumper. Because I want to win. And we lose with Trump.”

So, in Ryan’s view, Trump is bad simply because he hurts the Republican quest for power. But that prompts an important question: Why does he hurt the Republican quest for power? Why, for instance, did the majority of independent voters swing to the Democrats in the midterms?

Perhaps because Trump lies as he breathes, stoking hostility toward our free and fair elections.

Perhaps because Trump sows dangerous conspiracies, spreading QAnon garbage and goading his most unhinged followers to commit violence.

Perhaps because Trump’s feckless anti-science response to the Covid pandemic resulted in the unnecessary deaths of several hundred thousand Americans.

Perhaps because Trump, in couch potato mode, treated the Jan. 6 insurrection like it was a TV show.

Perhaps because Trump, on his way out the door, stole highly classified national security documents in violation of federal law, then refused to cough them up.

As we know, the list is endless. But Ryan couldn’t or wouldn’t check a single box. Trump is bad, apparently, only because he’s not winning. Ryan stuck to his story even when host Jonathan Karl teed him up by suggesting that perhaps it’s because Trump is “like an existential threat to the country.”

Karl gave him an opening big enough for a 747. But this was Ryan’s response:

“He’s unelectable (in 2024) because that suburban voter – you think he’s more popular since the ’20 election with the swing voter in America, or less?…I think he’s going to continue to lose altitude because we want to win. And we know with him we lose. We have a string of losses to prove that point.”

So, again: Why is Trump “unelectable”? Why, in Ryan’s estimation, is Trump less popular with “the swing voter in America”? Why is Trump going to “continue to lose altitude”? Why, in summation, was Ryan so reluctant to exhibit even a scintilla of moral awareness?

Back when Trump was new in town, circa 2017 and 2018, it was arguably understandable that Ryan felt it necessary to be diplomatic. After all, he had to work with the guy (to pass tax cuts for the rich, and thus balloon the budget deficit), to find some common ground in the policy realm. Ryan even confessed his strategy at a comedic dinner in October ’17 when he quipped, “Every morning I wake up in my office and scroll Twitter to see which tweets that I’ll have to pretend that I did not see.”

But now, with Trump long in exile, what is Ryan’s excuse for pulling punches? Why is it apparently so difficult for so many Republicans (Ryan is only the latest example) to denounce Trump for urgent legitimate reasons that go far beyond his scoreboard performance?

Why, indeed, are these emboldened Trump critics within the GOP so incapable of addressing the hatred pandemic that Trump has unleashed on America? (The guy who allegedly killed five people this weekend in a Colorado gay bar is the grandson of a MAGA Republican politician, natch.)

Bill Kristol, the veteran conservative commentator, tweeted a warning today: “If Republicans slide away from Trump without repudiating his deeds, where will we be? Trump may lose, but Trumpism – demagogic, illiberal, and lawless – will be alive and well in the body politic even if Trump isn’t.”

The real tragedy is that the GOP’s newly vocal Trump critics long ago stomped their moral compasses. Their only public beef with Trump – their only regret – is that they’ve lost races. How twisted is that?