To hear Paul Ryan tell it, former President Donald Trump is a kind of political Lord Voldemort: He's evil, yes, but for heaven's sake, don't say his name! In a speech last week apparently designed to rehabilitate Ryan's Trump-lickspittle image, the former House speaker appropriately but anonymously criticized the former president's continuing hold over the party. Yet he dared not attach Trump's name to the criticism. It's one of the many examples lately of the abject cowardice that still infects the GOP when it comes to Trump.

It's easy to be appalled by the most enthusiastic embracers of Trumpism and all the anti-democracy fervor that comes with them. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is among the worst offenders. But especially disappointing are the so-called establishment Republicans — the ones who called out Trump's unfitness before he won in 2016, then spent four years biting their tongues for fear of offending a vindictive president and his worshipful base. Ryan, along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are the prototypes.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Ryan, then the House speaker, was often critical of Trump's character and comments. Once Trump won the election, though, Ryan mostly ceased his criticism and focused on an area of common ground: passage of the 2017 GOP tax cut for the rich, which saddled the nation with almost $2 trillion in deficit spending while making barely a ripple in the economy.

In mid-2018, Ryan, then just 48, announced that his current House term would be his last. His surprise exit was widely interpreted as an admission that Republicans would lose the House later that year (which they did), and that Ryan was tired of having to pretend that he'd not heard or read whatever grotesque comment Trump had made on a given day.

Ryan has since gone on to a life of corporate boards and university lecturing gigs, but his endless fence-sitting regarding Trump apparently remains a constant. "Once again, we conservatives find ourselves at a crossroads," Ryan said in a speech Thursday in California. "And here's one reality we have to face: If the conservative cause depends on the populist appeal of one personality ... then we're not going anywhere."

It's an accurate assessment that would have benefited from the addition of the name of that disordered personality: Donald Trump. But even out of office, Ryan wasn't willing to go there.

On the same day Ryan was failing to specifically call out Trump, McConnell, still leading the Senate Republicans, was orchestrating the defeat of a congressional commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — covering for the GOP's enabling of Trump as he incited the riot. It's just another illustration of the bizarre, almost wizard-like hold that America's worst president still has over his adopted party.

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