Francis Wilkinson, Columnist

Trump Buries Paul Ryan Under Expensive Promises

The new president has delusions on health care. The speaker has designs on it.

Seeing is not believing.

Photographer: Zach Gibson/Getty Images
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“Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States,” Grover Norquist advised in 2012. Norquist, who has devoted his life to the cause of reducing taxes paid by the wealthiest Americans, was making a simple point. The next Republican president wouldn't need a brain. Paul Ryan had already mapped out the perfect GOP agenda. All a GOP president had to do was pick up a pen and sign it into law.

That, of course, was before a Republican famously derided as a "short-fingered vulgarian" won the 2016 presidential election. And the more Donald Trump talks, the more his working digits look like monkey wrenches.