OK, so I’m already breaking my vow to try not to write all the time about Trump’s awfulness, but this is irresistible. Also, I have the excuse that it’s apparently not getting the attention it deserves. Yesterday morning, our Tweeter in Chief tweeted, “Watch @JudgeJeanine on @FoxNews tonight at 9:00 P.M.” And what did (former) Judge Jeanine Pirro have to say? She laid all the blame for the GOP’s health care fiasco on Paul Ryan, and announced that “he’s got to go,” a demand that she repeated in a tweet of her own. Is it conceivable that Trump didn’t know what Judge Jeanine was going to say? Hardly. (If he in fact didn’t know, we would presumably have heard about that by now.)
Pause for a moment to consider: our swaggering, truculent president, seething with anger at Paul Ryan but lacking the courage, or candor, or something, to say so directly. So he passes the dagger to a Fox News swamp creature to stab in Ryan’s back. What a classy guy.
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Mel Brender March 26, 2017 at 6:24 pm
Only slightly off-topic, but since you’ve opened the door, I’d like to know your thoughts on the following (which I haven’t seen discussed anywhere):
Certainly the Republican AHCA was a fraud–it would have been much worse than the AHA it was to replace, leaving many millions of people without any health insurance at all. Apparently it failed because two groups of Republicans opposed it for opposite reasons: The Freedom Caucus because it was too liberal (!) and the moderate Republicans because it was too stingy.
But oddly, sinking the AHCA may have, in the short run, saved both Donald Trump and the Congressional Republicans. Had it passed, I suspect that once its effect became clear it would have aroused enormous anger among precisely those lower middle class voters who voted for Trump. This could conceivably have led to a Republican bloodbath in the 2018 House elections.
But now that it is off the table, both the Republican Congress members and Trump can continue to rail against ‘Obamacare’ while sabotaging it at the same time. They get to keep their base riled up and can keep pointing to the Democrats as the villains.
tonygreco March 26, 2017 at 8:11 pm
I agree that it might have hurt Trump and the GOP more, in the long run, if their bill had passed. (Of course, it’s still better for the country that it didn’t.) This was a double-edged sword for them, but they had to go through with it. And I’m sure that Trump does hope to sabotage the ACA and blame the Dems, but I’m doubtful that that will work. I think the polls, showing overwhelming disapproval of the GOP bill, mean that people are starting to wise up. Trump has deservedly lost all credibility on the issue of health care. I think he will own whatever mess he tries to create. If they’re smart, the Democrats will propose improvements to the ACA, to make sure the onus for any deterioration gets put on the GOP.
Jeffrey Herrmann March 27, 2017 at 1:11 am
It’s hard to know what would have been in the final version of the AHCA, since tRump had no policy commitments and was giving away pieces of the originally proposed bill to buy votes from various factions of Repugnicans. But it always seemed to make the really cruel cuts to Medicaid kick in only after the 2018 election. So, the cynical idea was that low information voters wouldn’t know how bad it was for them because they wouldn’t actually feel the pinch until after the midterm elections.
It is actually encouraging that so many voters took the trouble to inform themselves about the consequences of the AHCA and concluded they wanted no part of it.
The Repugnicans are already rounding on each other following this defeat, and that is a good thing. It would have been worse if they had the momentum of a victory.
Jeffrey Herrmann March 27, 2017 at 1:29 am
And by the way, it should be noted that Jeanine Pirro is not and never was a judge, anywhere. She only plays one on TV.
At least tRump’s “fine legal mind” who acts under the stage name “Judge Neapolitano” on Fux News, was once a judge, 22 yrs. ago.
tonygreco March 27, 2017 at 10:53 am
According to Wikipedia, she was a Westchester County court judge between 1990 and 1993.
Jeffrey Herrmann March 27, 2017 at 11:10 am
My bad. I thought her career started as Westchester D.A. It ended in disgrace.