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Popular vote loser Donald Trump took his third position on Trumpcare in the past 36 hours Wednesday in his lunch with Senate Republicans. On the Monday night he tweeted "Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in!" Then Tuesday morning it was "As I have always said, let ObamaCare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan." Right. Always. And now Wednesday, lunchtime, he's back to the bill that was just destroyed. In fact, it turns out that he reached out to Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) to try to rope him into it.
His remarks at the luncheon Wednesday, televised on MSNBC, reiterated that now he wants them to bring back the Trumpcare bill that has proven not to have the votes. "We have to repeal and replace Obamacare," he said. "We can repeal it, but the best is repeal and replace." He also told senators "I don't think we should leave town unless we have a health insurance plan." Trump didn't actually clarify if that by "we" he meant him, too. Fat chance.
Then he launched into all the great stuff the bill does, or would do if it could, but it totally does. Once again, he's completely fixated on the idea of selling insurance across state lines.
And remember this. Cross-country lines. Cross-state lines. Where you have—where it's almost impossible for insurance companies to compete in different states. We can't, because of, unfortunately, the 60 votes. Put that here. But it's going to come very soon. We're putting it in a popular bill.
You can watch the wheels slowly churning—he remembers the cross-country, cross-state (whatever) lines bit from all his campaign speeches. Then he remembers that they've told him ten bajillion times that it can't be in this bill, and then he comes back to it being in a "popular bill." And then minutes later, he came back to it! "We're going to have the cross-state lines knocked out," he said. Because that's the one thing about health insurance reform he can remember so he's obsessed by it. Never mind that it could actually be happening now, under current law. It doesn't because it's not something insurance companies want to do.
Make Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump angry. Keep calling your senators at (202) 224-3121, and tell them DON’T REPEAL OBAMACARE. After the call, tell us how it went.
Just to put a fine point on how deeply Trump does not understand what he's talking about and hasn't read anything at all about this bill and is totally out of his element, Donny, he said this: "Your premiums will be down 60 and 70 percent. People don't know that. Nobody hears it." That's perhaps because nobody has ever heard that before except Trump. It's all in his head. "So your premiums will be substantially lower. Repeals burdensome taxes. Big." (It doesn't repeal the taxes, either.)
All which is unlikely to actually push any senator to change their position. As Buzzfeed reports, "a certain realization is sinking in within the party, based on more than a dozen interviews in recent days: Donald Trump has been a historically weak and ineffective president." Not only that, he's so disconnected from this actual process that he won't bother to understand what he's asking them to do. Reporter April Ryan notes her talks with Republican sources. "The president is trying to force a vote. […] He can have all the lunches and meetings that he can call as much as he wants, but when it affects the senators' constituents and affects people, and people are going to these town hall meetings screaming, these senators feel it."
After the luncheon, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he's going to force the motion to proceed next week, but he didn't say which bill—repeal only or the failed Trumpcare—he would be trying to get to.