Saving Speaker Ryan

House Speaker Paul Ryan explained to lawmakers on Monday that it is no longer politically or personally possible for him to campaign with, or defend, Donald Trump. Although Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell hasn't said the same thing explicitly, he appears to take much the same view. Both men have decided to focus their energy and attention on keeping Republican control of the House and Senate.

This is the right thing to do. They deserve support as they perform this act of political triage and let individual members of Congress know that they will not face recrimination or retribution if they distance themselves from their party's presidential nominee.

Trump has apologized for the vulgar sexual comments he made in 2005, which were caught on tape and so damagingly released last week. He has also said he is now a changed man. There is no need to doubt him on either count. But it's also the case that his apology and claim to have changed acknowledge blames for alienating people of good taste and judgment. So he is wrong to lay a charge of betrayal against Ryan and other elected Republicans for declining to support him wholeheartedly. The Speaker deserves support rather than condemnation for making the decision he has made.

Here's why: retaining the GOP's hold on Congress is vitally important for the country. Trump is at best patchily conservative, and Hillary Clinton is no conservative at all. Indeed, she has abandoned the shreds of centrist political philosophy she once clung to, and through the primaries sought instead to win over leftists who were all-in for the socialist, Sen. Bernie Sanders. She eventually ran cynically as a radical. A Republican Congress is therefore needed for stability and to hold back the executive from the excesses to which it will be prone whomever wins the White House.

The last thing America needs now is an executive as unconstrained asPresident Obama was during his first two divisive years in office, when he and his fellow Democrats rammed through such enormities as Obamacare and the Dodd Frank financial reform bill — both hugely damaging.