Popular vote loser Donald Trump's twisted plan to kill Obamacare is a strangely self-defeating one. He's loudly and publicly projecting his plan to sabotage the law, knowing very well what the consequences will be: millions of people losing health insurance. He also knows that his latest plan—refusing to pay cost-sharing subsidies to insurance companies—will make that happen immediately. He knows this, as Nicholas Bagley explains. It is very deliberate.
In his interview with the Wall Street Journal, President Trump acknowledged that this arcane appropriations dispute represents an existential threat to the viability of the individual markets: "Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn't get that money." But instead of saying whether he would continue making the payments, he's deliberately perpetuating uncertainty in order to force Democrats to play ball. For Trump, uncertainty is leverage—why would you surrender a negotiating advantage?
But he's overplaying his hand. Democrats aren't about to walk away from their most significant legislative achievement of the past fifty years just because of a fight over cost-sharing reductions. They know that Trump will be blamed if the insurance markets burn—we've even got polling data on that. Congressional Republicans are likely to be scrambling for a solution, not the other way around. It's as if Trump is holding a gun to his own head and threatening to fire: maybe he's crazy enough to do it, but Democrats won't save him from himself.
It's looking likelier all the time that Republicans are going to have be the ones to save Trump from himself, as they realize they'll have to save their own hides. When people start losing their health insurance, they'll know who to blame, and they'll take that anger out on the nearest target—their Republican representative in the 2018 election.
Keep throwing them those anchors, Democrats. It's the only way to save the law.