We’re all aware that Donald Trump’s grandiose promises have less substance than smoke, that his words have less value than soiled Kleenex. But sometimes it still behooves us to hit the pause button and parse their inherent worthlessness, if only to remind ourselves how urgent it is to extract him from the office for which he’s so dangerously unfit.
For instance, two weeks ago on Fox News, the stable seer shared this dramatic pronunciamento:
“We’re signing a health care plan within two weeks. A full and complete health care plan…And nobody will have done what I’m doing…We’re getting rid of (Obamacare) because we’re going to replace it with something much better…Things that we’ve never done before. And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.”
Well, those two weeks have come and gone. And yes, they were indeed “very exciting,” at least if you believe that 155,000 pandemic deaths are “very exciting,” and that his support for a demon-semen quack qualifies as “very exciting,” and the Senate GOP’s refusal to extend federal jobless benefits for 30 million people is “very exciting.”
Still, we gotta ask him: Where’s that health care plan you promised? You were going to “sign” it within two weeks, remember? Congress would somehow magically pass it, put it on your desk, it’d be “better” than Obamacare, you’d affix it with your Sharpie signature…
Hello? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
Distracted as we are by Trump’s authoritarian actions and demagoguery – his goon invasion of Portland, his Putin-pleasing threats to destroy the credibility of the November election – it’s vitally important to remember that his policy cupboard is virtually bare. Unless you’re an upper-bracket American who reaped big bucks from his 2017 tax cut, you’re basically less better off than a Trump University grad who got settlement money.
What’s most fascinating about his health care promise is how often he has recycled it.
In 2015, at the dawn of his candidacy, he pledged to replace Obamacare with “something terrific,” but during the campaign he never got specific.
In January 2017, at the dawn of his presidency, he promised “insurance for everybody…you will be very proud of what we put forth having to do with health care,” and he said (in his inimitable way) that it would happen very soon: “It will be essentially simultaneously. It will be various segments but will most likely be on the same day or the same week, but probably the same day. Could be the same hour.”
In the spring of 2019, having again pledged to replace Obamacare with something “spectacular,” he again punted on specifics. He wanted Senate Republicans to craft a replacement plan, but Senate Republicans wanted the White House to take the lead. So again nothing happened. Republicans didn’t want to touch the issue, because they knew it was political dynamite. A few months earlier, in the blue wave of 2018, House Democrats had scored their biggest midterm sweep since 1974 by decimating the GOP on health care. Obamacare was more popular than ever, and voters were wise to the fact the GOP wanted to kill it without a clue how to replace it. According to the ’18 exit polls, health care was the top issue by a decisive margin; the voters who rated the issue #1 favored Democratic House candidates by 75 to 23 percent – another big reason why Republicans lost so many suburban seats.
So it was clear, two weeks ago on Fox News, that Trump was talking out of his tush.
Which prompts another question: Why in the world would he promise to speedily “sign” a replacement health care “within two weeks” when (a) Congress can’t pass anything in two weeks, (b) the Democratic House would never OK such a plan anyway, and (c) the Republicans on the Hill have no appetite for the fight and have in fact failed to craft any replacement plan during the last nine years?
Because he has nothing substantive to say. His sole recourse is to fill the air time with vaporous imaginings. His rhetorical bandwidth is very narrow – from demagogue to carnival barker – but as benumbed as we are, we need to hold him accountable and work for the day when, once again, the words and promises of a President of the United States will be freighted with meaning.