Is Trump falling into Paul Ryan's trap?
By Greg Sargent March 15 at 10:25 AM
The story of the morning is that the GOP health plan may be in trouble, because even allies of President Trump are warning him to ditch it before he gets dragged down along with it. The alarm they are sounding is simple: By embracing Paul Ryan’s plan, which would dramatically slash taxes on the richest Americans while massively rolling back coverage for the poorest Americans, he is losing touch with the “populist” message and ideological heterodoxy that helped drive his appeal to working-class voters.
Here’s why this is important: It lays down a marker with which we can evaluate whether Trump is actually governing as the “populist” he telegraphed he would be. If Trump does not cut Ryan’s plan loose, we should theoretically be able to agree that in some key respects, the brand of populism he ran on during the campaign was pure fraudulence — by the lights of his own allies.
The Post reports that a “simmering rebellion of conservative populists loyal to President Trump is further endangering the GOP health-care push”:
Trump’s allies worry that he is jeopardizing his presidency by promoting the bill spearheaded by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (Wis.), arguing that it would fracture Trump’s coalition of working- and middle-class voters, many of them older and subsisting on federal aid….
Trump loyalists warned that the president was at risk of violating some of his biggest campaign promises — such as providing broad health coverage for all Americans and preserving Medicaid and other entitlement programs — in service to an ideological project championed for years by Ryan and other establishment Republicans.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/03/15/is-trump-falling-into-paul-ryans-trap/?utm_term=.b6146e109338&wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1