On Saturday, Donald Trump dusted off one of his oldest campaign promises with a new declaration that he was once again "seriously looking at alternatives" to "Obamacare," the landmark health care bill known more formally as the Affordable Care Act.
Republican senators have now been queried as to what they think of that, and surprise! It's going over like a lead balloon. Politico probed a few of them and got responses ranging from, "I don't see that as being the rallying cry" from Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, to, "I don't hear any Republicans talking about it" from Sen. Chuck Grassley. Senate Minority Whip John Thune gave a very diplomatic response that essentially boiled down to telling Donald to pound sand.
“Boy, I haven’t thought about that one in a while,” Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said. “I just don't know what [Trump's] thinking or how we would go about doing that. That fight, as you know, was six years ago now. And so, if he’s got some ideas, we’re open to them.”
That's the senatorial version of a sneer—a get with the times, old man rebuff of a guy who just showed you his collection of disco balls and platform shoes.
Trump has been able to recycle quite a few of his old 2016 campaign promises into new, more explicitly authoritarian versions, and Republican lawmakers haven't so much as raised an eyebrow. Few GOP legislators appear to have similarly rebuffed Trump's calls to jail political enemies, end birthright citizenship and deport millions of immigrants and immigrant-born Americans, and free the Jan. 6 insurrectionists who attacked Congress on his behalf, but Republicans have been stung good and hard and often with their promises to "repeal Obamacare." If Trump wants to make a campaign promise to revisit those past fiascos, he'll be doing it on his own.
While Senate Republicans are very politely suggesting to Trump that he might want to shut his pie hole on this one, the man he'll be facing in next year's election very much wants Trump to keep blabbing. President Joe Biden himself called out Trump's statement on Monday, and The Washington Post reports that the Biden campaign has "expedited" plans to target Trump on the issue, including new swing-state ads that will run this week. Health care reform still remains wildly popular, and those initial Republican attempts to smear the new law as "Obamacare" backfired on them long ago. Democrats now love the term, and Biden would like nothing more than for Trump to saddle Republicans with new promises to make everybody's health insurance worse.
Trump likely meant his Obamacare musing to be nothing but a throwaway line, one of the seemingly infinite number of social media burps he sends out to test what sort of things his fans like to hear and which they don't. It does, however, add another data point to the growing public suspicion that Trump is indeed living in the recycled past—which is precisely what Thune picked at in his diplomatic response. Trump has been mentioning "Obama" on the campaign trail for months now in contexts where he clearly seems to mean Joe Biden. Even after an attempted coup and in the midst of multiple criminal trials that could well land him in prison, Trump's political ambitions still seem fixated on proving himself better than President Barack Obama, the man who mildly but publicly roasted him during a 2016 press dinner.
All of the Republican-pushed talk of Biden's age and supposed frailties comes during a time when Trump appears to be quite visibly falling apart,with his demeanor becoming louder, angrier, more erratic, and even less tethered to reality than before. "Why are you still talking about Obamacare?" could be an effective Democratic attack—not just because the health care reforms it imposed are now so widely popular, but because it does show Trump as a one-trick pony whose trick we've already seen.
We probably won't be hearing much more about an Obamacare repeal from Trump's camp. The line didn't land; Trump's own fans have moved on, now basing their personalities around new beliefs like "elections are bad" and "sedition is good, actually." Trump will follow those applause lines instead, and it will make the country a worse place. That's what he's good at. It's the only thing he's good at.
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