Robinson: What Trump could learn but wont from defeat
Last week’s health care fiasco could end up being a positive experience for President Trump if he learns a few obvious lessons. Spoiler alert: He won’t.
The first thing that should dawn on Trump is that the warring Republican factions in Congress have multiple agendas, none of which remotely resembles his own. This is why the bill that House Speaker Paul Ryan was forced to withdraw on Friday — the abominable American Health Care Act — made such a cruel mockery of Trump’s expansive campaign promises.
A “populist” president who promised health insurance “for everybody” ended up supporting legislation that would have taken away coverage from 24 million people. Many, if not most, of the victims would have been working-class voters — the “forgotten Americans” Trump claimed to champion. Now that he has time, maybe he will actually read the bill (or have someone summarize it for him) and realize how truly awful it was.
You don’t have to be a policy wonk to recognize that replacing income-based subsidies with less generous across-the-board tax credits would mean a net transfer of resources from poorer people to wealthier people. That’s just fine with Ryan and the “mainstream” House Republicans who hung in there with legislation that Ronald Reagan or even Barry Goldwater would have considered extreme.
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