Bob Woodward and Robert Acosta’s book Peril has already created significant waves. Yesterday, we reported on the fact that after Trump was elected, then-Speaker of the House Paul Ryan sought out expert opinions and read about how to deal with pathological narcissists. It seemed somewhat sensible at the time until Mary Trump had a chance to speak on the subject and – as per usual – Mary Trump saw the situation with much more clarity.

Mary Trump is angry at the people who didn’t recognize long before the 2016 election that Trump was an imminent danger to the country and enabled his victory, only to realize after the fact that they couldn’t control Trump. Mary Trump appeared on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show on MSNBC last night and dropped some truth on the situation.

As is often the case, it’s shocking but not surprising. One of the things that’s shocking about it is that Paul Ryan was allegedly found flat-footed after the election when anybody who was paying attention, anybody with some modicum of intelligence and insight who had met Donald for five minutes would have known what a deeply psychologically disordered person he was.

The one thing we might note is that Paul Ryan almost certainly knew that Trump had a psychological disorder prior to the election but almost certainly thought Trump was going to lose. Everyone else thought Trump would lose.

So for Paul Ryan to have waited for Donald to be in the Oval Office before doing his homework and attempting to put up safeguards, long after he actually could have done something to make a difference is, I think, testament to how we got where we are, the kind of fecklessness of people like Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake, who instead of taking a stand against what was clearly a dangerous and incompetent person, they just stood aside and let him ascend to power and then have left the rest of us to deal with the quite serious fallout.

True. If they knew how bad it would get – and they should have – they should have been more proactive in taking steps to assure that Trump wouldn’t win.

“So the problem is because potentially moderating influences — and I’m not suggesting that he ultimately would have been, but at the time, the belief was that people like Paul Ryan would be some kind of moderating influence, because they chose to be cowards and get out of public life, we now understand that Donald is not the end result of how bad the Republican Party can be, he’s the leading edge of it.”

Now that is one insightful comment. Many of us have spent far too much time talking about the fact that Trump was the natural result of a movement. But Mary is right. Trump was the natural result but also represents the leading edge of what is to come, and “moderates” like Paul Ryan and Jeff Flake bear much of the blame in believing they could normalize Trump. Nothing can normalize Trump and we’re well beyond normalizing the movement he’s begun.

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