Having taken health care hostage, Donald Trump isn't about to surrender that hostage without getting the ransom that he wants. Trump has pulled every lever available, by both executive order and regulatory ruling, to sabotage the Affordable Care Act and put the lives of millions of Americans in jeopardy. He followed his assault with a demand that Congress solve the issue, or else.
Deliberately denying health care to citizens, especially working class citizens who depend on the ACA may seem cruel. Because it is. But Trump is called to a higher purpose: Destroying everything ever touched by Barack Obama. In the service of that goal, he's not about to accept a solution that leaves anything of the existing system intact, not unless he collects some solid payola.
President Donald Trump will oppose any congressional attempts to reinstate funding for Obamacare subsidies — unless he gets something in return, his budget director Mick Mulvaney said in an interview Friday morning.
For weeks—since well before the failure of the last Republican healthcare bill—Democratic Senator Patty Murray and Republican Senator Lamar Alexander have been working on a bipartisan compromise that would preserve critical components of the ACA while giving Republicans changes to the bill that they've long wanted. It's exactly the kind of thing Ameritrade continuously tell pollsters they want to see. And exactly what Trump wants to deny them.
“Instead of saying what we might support, I’d say I’m pretty sure what we won’t support, which is just a clean Murray-Alexander bill,” Mulvaney said, sitting in his spacious Eisenhower Executive Office Building Friday morning.
The position of the Trump regime is that they're not going to give up the Americans who selfishly want the medical care they need to stay alive without extracting something of value to Trump. Because … Trump’s White House is populated with sociopaths whose level of empathy extends only to themselves and their children. Well, some of their children.
What does Trump want to give people that they had until he took it away? Think “wall."
Mulvaney is bullish about securing Trump’s priorities in a December funding bill, and he threatened — not for the first time — a government shutdown if Trump doesn’t get them.
“The president fully expects his priorities to be funded, and the wall is one of them,” Mulvaney said. “It would be highly unlikely for the president to sign a funding bill in December that does not fund his priorities.”
Which should bring a response that even conservative lawmakers will find familiar: This country does not negotiate with terrorists.
In putting millions of American lives on the line in order to force Congress to accede to his demands, Trump has demonstrated just how far he'll go to get what he wants. And just how important it is to show him that these tactics will not work.