David Frum, writing about Trump’s failure to advance health care legislation, observes the truth about Trump:
Regular reminder that Donald Trump’s core competency is not dealmaking with powerful counter-parties. It is duping gullible victims.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) March 24, 2017
That’s right, and cannot be said enough: Trump’s a confidence man, and he preys on the unwary, desperate, or gullible.
There’s a local angle in all this: although Whitewater’s policymakers and town notables want to portray themselves as advancing sophisticated (often tech-oriented programs), their plans rest mostly on false claims and third-tier work hawked to an economically struggling community. They claim job gains without describing them in detail, they claim economic benefits without enumerating them in detail, and they hide costs and setbacks that would place in context any benefits they hazily claim.
The few, self-described ‘Whitewater Advocates’ who push these policies aren’t selling community betterment: they’re selling their own social advancement at the cost of the disproportionately large number of indigent and struggling residents in this city. And Like Trump, when they meet capable counter-parties, their scheming fares poorly.
They’ve had over the years, from their own perspective one supposes, public-relations success with dodgy proposal after dodgy proposal. I’d guess the high watermark for them was several years ago, around 2010-2012. They should have quit then, while the tide was still high. The water’s receding now, and one sees how much waste litters the shore.
Don’t anybody tell me what a genius Paul Ryan is ever again.
I watched, with not a little schadenfreude, Trump and the Wisco-Kid get their backsides handed to them by their own party yesterday. The R-Team managed, by an unholy alliance of the insane and the semi-sane, to stumble into the correct position.
That dog deserved to die. It dying was the best possible result for the Republicans. Had it become law, the R-Team would have been deader than the Whigs, come 2018. Nobody but the devout Kool-Aide drinkers liked this law. That it was killed, in part, by the wing of the party that didn’t think that it knuckled the poor hard enough, makes a huge statement about the corrosive effect of Gerrymandering on the American political system. It also makes a large statement about the chronically cruel nature of way too many in the Republican party.
The Wisco-Kid owns this one. Trump was pretty much along for the ride. Ryan, as the official intellectual uber-fuhrer of the right, and as the wonkiest R-Teamer loose in the wild, managed to put together a plan that was supported by only 17% of the population. Then he tried to ram it thru, so that he could get a photo-op of him repealing the ACA on the 7th anniversary of its original passing. Not surprisingly it blew up on him. I think his speakership is in some danger over this. He tried his level best to lead his party over a cliff, which cannot be making any Republican happy.
He also exhibited no understanding of political tradecraft, which ought to DQ him stat. Bulldozing a bill affecting 1/6th of the economy and 24 million citizens thru in 2.5 weeks, with no buy-in from all involved, is an astoundingly rookie move, and doomed to fail. If that pooch of a bill actually made it to a vote, my estimate is that he would have lost about 100 R-Teamers. Trying to force it to a vote, as Trump and Ryan did, only to have it most certainly fail in the Senate, was a monumentally suicidal move. What was he thinking???
As we just found out: Repeal and (maybe) Replace was always an empty slogan. It riled up the FOXaholics, but was, and is, not going to happen. The original R-Team bitch about the ACA was that once the Government does something decent for its citizens, there is no turning back. The R-Team learned that from opposing Social Security, kicking off a 40 year journey thru the wilderness for the Republicans. That is why they fought it as hard as possible up front. After 7 years of ACA, there is no turning back. It is suicidal to even try.
The smartest thing the R-Team could do is actually try to improve the act, not sabotage it. They could garner a lot of good will by extending Medicare down to age 55 and administering a clubbering to big Pharma. It won’t happen, as the DNA of the party demands that they do everything within their power to screw the poor. Tax breaks are really all that matters…
It would be nice to think that Trump and Ryan will spend some quiet time reflecting on this debacle and how not to repeat it. Not likely…