I live with a cat who’s always chasing her tail. Guess who else is doing that.
Yesterday, the felonious criminal defendant pawed this beaut on social media: “I don’t want to terminate Obamacare. I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTH CARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!” A few days earlier, he actually insisted: “I’m seriously looking at alternatives.”
This guy is pondering policy alternatives to Obamacare? We’d sooner see a chimp playing Mozart.
He’s reached the point where he’s recycling his old cons. It’s pathetically comical – but it’s also a blessing, because we need lite fare to alleviate his more fascist rantings, like Tuesday’s riff about vowing to use government to “come down hard” on media outlets that have the temerity to criticize him.
What’s arguably most hilarious is that the guy who’s running for president in order to stay out of jail is dredging up an issue that his fellow Republicans are terrified to touch. They’ve come to understand – even if Trump, at his most ignorant, has not – that targeting Obamacare is political suicide. They lost the House in the 2018 midterms because they were threatening to kill the coverage of 23 million people and replace it with…nothing. According to the ’18 exit polls, health care was the top voting issue by a decisive margin – and those voters favored Democratic candidates by 75 to 23 percent.
Rest assured, Republicans on Capitol Hill aren’t cooking up any replacement plans for Obamacare. First of all, Republicans don’t do policy. Second, even the dimmest of their bulbs is wary of sabotaging a program that’s now quite popular (in the most recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 59 percent of Americans give Obamacare a thumbs-up), a program that has reduced the number of uninsured people to an historic low. Lastly, Republicans had more than a decade to unveil some kind of alt-Obamacare, and never once have they served up anything substantive or salable to the public.
Prior to the rise of MAGA they endlessly dithered and got nowhere, in part because helping people on the lower end of the income scale is clearly not their thing. Then along came Trump, whose vows to speedily craft a replacement plan belonged in the realm of satire.
“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” he promised while campaigning in 2016. Never happened.
“Health care is coming along great,” he said as president in 2017, referring to a supposedly imminent replacement plan. “We are talking to many groups and it will end in a beautiful picture!” Never happened.
He was still running that con in the summer of 2020: “We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan…We’re going to be doing a health-care plan. We’re going to be doing a very inclusive health-care plan. I’ll be signing it sometime very soon…Might be Sunday. But it’s going to be very soon.” Never happened.
Current Republicans on the Hill have no interest in touching Trump’s pet issue – and they admit it. John Thune, one of the party’s top senators, said the other day, “Boy, I haven’t thought about that one in a while.” Colleague Charles Grassley said, “I don’t hear any Republicans talking about it.” House Republican Ralph Norman said that if they were to target Obamacare yet again, “the devil’s in the details. It depends on – replace it with what?” And Senator Thom Tillis admits defeat: “We’ve gotten so far down the road now that it’s almost technically impossible” to kill Obamacare; he’s right – as evidenced by the numerous studies documenting the program’s successes.
Trump, of course, is cognitively incapable of refuting reality, and he won’t bother to try. His latest outburst (“Obamacare Sucks!!!”) is just another primal scream. His hatred of Obamacare extends no further than the fact that Barack Obama’s name is attached to a popular policy, and that his is attached to nothing remotely equivalent.
But if he wants to keep threatening the health coverage of 23 million people – thereby gifting Joe Biden with an issue that benefits Democrats – I have three words for the guy: Go for it.