Donald Trump Is Handling the GOP's Healthcare Meltdown as Ineptly as Possible
The GOP’s healthcare implosion has shown, once and for all, just how inept President Donald Trump really is.
At the exact moment the GOP lost the crucial votes necessary to pass its long-promised healthcare legislation, the president was spending his evening wining and dining Senate Republicans at the White House. News that senators Jerry Moran and Mike Lee were plunging the fatal dagger into the bill reportedly came as a total shock to Trump.
“Why would we have a dinner like that if we knew people were going to drop out?,” one White House aide told Politico.
But it’s not just Trump’s inability to keep track of one of his signature campaign promises that demonstrates his ineffectiveness. He also clearly did not understand how his healthcare bill works in the first place, having allegedly been unable to differentiate between Medicare and Medicaid.
Nevertheless, from Monday evening into Tuesday morning, the president lashed out against Democrats and Republicans alike in a series of tweets seemingly designed to inspire confidence in his political prowess.
The tweets, both contradictory (which is it: “Just REPEAL”, or “as I’ve aways said, let Obamacare fail”?) and delusional (“Dems will join in!”) are more than just the typical Trumpian bluster; they’re a sign that, when faced with the actual task of legislating, Trump is cringingly, laughably out of his depth.
Update, 1:30PM—Less than 24 hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised to resurrect a 2015 bill that would have repealed Obamacare without an immediate replacement, the GOP’s latest—and possibly last—attempt to undo President Obama’s signature legislation came to an abrupt and ignominious halt, with three Republican senators vowing to oppose such a move and thus denying McConnell the numbers he needed to advance the bill.
In response, President Trump displayed the same cartoonishly incompetent approach he has taken to the entire healthcare debacle.
“We’re not gonna own it,” Trump told reporters, adding later that the key to passing his wildly discredited healthcare legislation was to “get more Republicans elected,” despite the fact that the GOP currently holds both houses of Congress, and the Oval Office.
Despite his willingness to wipe his hands clean of the entire process, Trump nevertheless insisted that he deserved a measure of credit for helping sway the bulk of the Senate GOP conference, saying the vote solely within the party “would have been 48-4.”
“Impressive,” he continued, “by any standard.”
Truly.