On Tuesday April 11, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan officially announced that he would not be running for re-election after 20 years in Congress at only 49 years old. Ryan represents the first Congressional district of Wisconsin.

The decision was widely questioned, as many wondered what warnings it might heed for the rest of the country. People, including Chris Christie, the former governor of New Jersey, speculated that Ryan dropped out because he was skeptical about the Republicans’ chances of keeping the majority in the House in the upcoming election. 

Others speculated that Ryan would run for president in 2020. Ryan discredited both of these theories.

“The last thing I am thinking about is running for something,” Ryan said to CNN.

He claims that he decided not to re-run for his family. Ryan has three kids and a wife and says that he wants to be more than a “weekend dad.” The decision was made by the whole family over the spring recess.

It is still unclear who will take Ryan’s place as Speaker. The two frontrunners are Kevin McCarthy, the House Majority Leader, and Steve Scalise, who serves as the Majority Whip.

When Ryan took office in 2015, he was the youngest Speaker of the House in over 100 years. He is notorious for not wanting the job but taking it anyway, after the resignation of former Speaker John Boehner caused chaos within the party.

Ryan’s main goal in his career has been to overhaul the tax code of the United States. He implemented some legislation as a member of the Ways and Means committee before becoming speaker, but this latest tax bill was when he finally achieved success. Ryan credits President Donald Trump for allowing him to do so.

“Speaker Paul Ryan is a truly good man,” Trump tweeted.

The bill is not without controversy however. The United States’ deficit is already increasing at a greater rate, and it is expected to grow over 1 million dollars by 2020.

And, Ryan’s tenuous relationship with Trump was no secret. Before Trump became the Republican nominee in the election of 2016, Ryan was an active critic of Trump’s tweets.

After Trump’s election, Ryan’s criticisms did not cease, although they did get much sparser.

“Every morning I wake up in my office and I scroll Twitter to see which tweets I will have to pretend that I did not see later on,” Ryan joked at a Charity Dinner in 2017.

Ryan is unsure what he will do next.