Unless Paul Ryan spends the weekend searching for members of the House Freedom Caucus to hold at gunpoint before hastily scheduling a Monday re-vote, it looks like Trumpcare is dead in the water. After literally years of running political campaigns at every level promising to repeal the Affordable Care Act at the earliest opportunity, this newly minted unified Republican government blew it in spectacular fashion, suffering a monumental defeat on its signature issue and on the largest stage possible. It's been a grim couple of months, yes, but this helps a little.
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If you're into pointing fingers, there is no shortage of candidates for your ire: Paul Ryan, for being so thirsty to get rid of the Affordable Care Act that he couldn't wait to shoot his shot until he had cooked up an alternative that was demonstrably better by any metric; mainstream Republican legislators, who were so confident in their party's ability to deliver on the repeal-and-replace pledge that they never even considered coming up with something that might appeal to moderate Democrats and garner some badly needed votes from the other side of the aisle; and the House Freedom Caucus, for refusing to budge even the tiniest amount from their myopic "Don't Tread on Me" agenda and hanging their entire party out to dry in the process. The grim reality for the GOP is that almost all of their wounds on this are self-inflicted, and in the wave of Trumpcare retrospectives and obituaries to come, they'll get to relive them over and over.
The biggest loser of this debacle, though, is Donald Trump, a political neophyte who wanted desperately to show he has the skills and temperament befitting the job he holds. One of the central premises of his presidential pitch was that he was The Closer, a preternaturally gifted negotiator who could get things done in the delicate situations in which feckless politicians, on their own, couldn't seal the deal. Instinctively, we knew that this was probably a lie, but the failure of the health-care-reform effort shows just how brazen a lie it was. Donald Trump was afforded every institutional advantage that a president with an ambitious legislative agenda could ask for, and when it came time to put those much-hyped skills into practice, he couldn't even get the thing past one legislative chamber. It is genuinely hard to screw up something this easy, but Trump, ever the innovator, somehow found a way.
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Even if you believe that Paul Ryan is the one at fault here, Trump, not Ryan, is the man in the White House, and part of being the president is that, rightly or wrongly, you shoulder the blame when things go south. The man spent a year on the campaign trail promising a "beautiful" Obamacare replacement that would provide better coverage for more Americans, but it's easy to yell grandiose pledges at giant, frenzied rallies without thinking carefully about whether you'll have anything to show once voters call your bluff. Every time, Donald Trump got caught up in the moment.
After Ryan's actual plan turned out to be none of the things that Trump promised his voters, though, the president proved too dense to understand the plan's intricacies, too lazy to concoct a viable solution, and/or too afraid of looking weak to back down from his repeal-or-bust position. He responded in the only way he knows how: by closing his eyes tightly, shouting a little louder, and hoping that his problem will go away. Bluffing is a cheap thrill, and if you do it for long enough, you're going to get exposed. Only two months in to Donald Trump's presidency, today's giant red "FAILURE" stamp is a fitting price to pay for his ineptitude and cowardice.
