Presidenting isn't no fun anymoar
Pity poor Donald Trump. He's the world's greatest dealmaker, and yet here he is just telling Congress they'd better pass an Obamacare replacement of some kind today -- he doesn't really care what's in it, really, as long as he wins -- or he'll just take his nuclear football and go home. Or to his home in Florida. Which he was going to do anyway, but the point is, he's really not enjoying this presidenting gig as much as he thought he would, according to some traitors who spoke to the Failing New York Times, and frankly he wishes now he'd started with something everyone likes, like cutting taxes for millionaires:
Mr. Trump has told four people close to him that he regrets going along with Speaker Paul D. Ryan’s plan to push a health care overhaul before unveiling a tax cut proposal more politically palatable to Republicans.
He said ruefully this week that he should have done tax reform first when it became clear that the quick-hit health care victory he had hoped for was not going to materialize on Thursday, the seventh anniversary of the act’s passage, when the legislation was scheduled for a vote.
Guess that pledge to repeal and replace the ACA on his first day -- or sixty-third -- is looking a lot less shiny to him, now that Trump is the last person in government to realize health care is actually very complicated. Which is not to say he's given up on ACA repeal -- who knows, maybe he'll get a miraculous last-minute poor-people-killing success! But Trump is thoroughly bored with health care now, whatever happens, and he's going to have to go to Mar-a-Lago, play some golf, and yell at some foreign workers before he feels any better. Maybe a campaign rally. He could hold another campaign rally. Why can't the House of Representatives be replaced with the people at his rallies? Those are GOOD Americans who would definitely vote for anything he handed them.
The Times story also says Thursday night's take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum came after two top Trumpkins, Steve Bannon and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, also became disenchanted with the "healthcare" bill and the compromises being made to satisfy rightwing Republicans. We found that a little surprising, since we'd assumed Bannon only got excited about measures to make America whiter.
The Times thinkypiece goes on and on about how frustrating all this is for Trump, who's accustomed to being the master of his domain without a lot of troublesome "other branches of government" getting in the way, because of course he had no idea how government works and never planned to win anyway. Or in political analysis-speak:
Crashing on the shoals of Congress marks Mr. Trump’s first true encounter with legislative realities and the realization that a president’s power is less limitless than it appears, particularly in the face of an intransigent voting bloc. Mr. Trump is not used to a hard no — but that was the word of the week.
The poor lad. And the main takeaway from the piece is that, big surprise, for all his pledges that his fantastic ACA replacement would give more people better coverage at a lower cost, Donald Trump really doesn't give two shits about how "his" policies will affect people, because he is a sick narcissist who cares only about winning (fine, that last bit is us, not the Times ). Doesn't especially matter to him what he wins:
If Mr. Trump has any advantage in the negotiations, it is his ideological flexibility: He is more interested in a win, or avoiding a loss, than any of the arcane policy specifics of the complicated measure, according to a dozen aides and allies interviewed over the past week who described his mood as impatient and jittery. Already, he has shown that flexibility by going back on campaign promises that no one would lose coverage when the Affordable Care Act was replaced and he would not cut Medicaid.
Pfft, sure, people who lose Medicaid will die, but as long as they do it at home or in an ER, Trump can still insist he was right when he said "nobody is going to be dying on the streets with a President Trump."
The other big reveal in the Times piece is that Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, "has said for days that the bill was a mistake to support," so it's good to see the administration lining up its sour grapes just in case the whole thing falls apart. If winning is more important than policy, then obviously knowing whom to blame for a loss is far more important than fixing your own mistakes. The chief bad guy in the possible failure of TrumpDon'tCare will be Paul Ryan, who pushed for killing the ACA and a few thousand poor people against what Trump will now say was his better judgment. Totally not Trump's fault, and if the ACA replacement fails, Trump can easily manage the mental gymnastics -- the only exercise the man gets -- necessary to convince himself the real reason the bill went nowhere was that Paul Ryan's bill didn't live up to the promises Trump made, darn that nasty Paul Ryan.
Also, in a moment that deserves to be mocked every bit as much as George W's "I call on all nations to stop these terrorist killers. Now watch this drive!" quip, the Times notes that while healthcare negotiations appeared to be circling the drain Thursday, his "reality check came with a Trumpian dose of the surreal" as Trump met with trucking industry executives, then played Li'l Trucker Trump in the cab of a big rig:
Meeting with trucking execs, Pres. Trump climbed into this truck, honking the horn https: //t.co/zDvIh6hEcR pic.twitter.com/6BKHW4oW54
— CBS News (@CBSNews) March 23, 2017
Yep. He's feeling better already:
Yr Wonkette is not at all prone to mood swings now that we're ad-free. We'd just be delighted if you could click the Donate linky below this article so we can keep on truckin'.
[ The Failing New York Times / WaPo / The Hill / Benjamin Eagles on Twitter]
Agree, nicely done.Congrats to the person who did this!
Plausible deniability.