The orange menace, who continues to "ace" his cognitive tests, is proposing a real brilliant idea: repealing the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"):
Unable to come up with new policy ideas, former president Donald Trump has returned to playing the greatest hits. A case in point: He is once again threatening to repeal Obamacare.
It’s hard to think of a more wrongheaded campaign promise than this, on both political and policy grounds.
To
be sure, there was once a time when destroying Obamacare, a.k.a. the
Affordable Care Act, was a winning issue for Republicans. For the first
few years after the marquee health-care law passed in 2010, many voters
despised it. The law’s favorability was underwater in almost every poll
for the first six years of its existence.
Such
disdain had relatively little to do with what the law actually did.
Yes, there was a small slice of the population angered by the loss of
cheap, threadbare health coverage that was being phased out. A few other
critics had philosophical objections to the law’s objectives — i.e.,
whether the government should even try to guarantee universal access to
insurance, or to specific kinds of health-care services.
But for the most part, it was the GOP’s fearmongering campaigns that
gave the law a black eye. Obamacare was a technical and complicated
suite of programs, and government complexity is generally an opportunity for demagogues. So demagogue Republicans did, convincing Americans that this scary new statute would kill not only jobs and federal budgets, but somehow even your beloved grandma, too. (Remember “death panels”?)
None of these things came to pass. And while the Obamacare brand might
have been unpopular, most of Obamacare’s actual provisions were
well-liked. Nearly every major plank
of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) — such as guaranteeing coverage to
people with preexisting conditions, expanding Medicaid, and allowing
children to stay on their parents’ insurance plans for longer — was and
continues to be favored by the public.
But it's not favored by a Malignant Loser who has only a hateful, destructive, un-American legacy from his dark four years in office. Being the sociopathic narcissist that he is, he can't stand to see President Obama's most significant achievement survive, regardless of the pain and difficulties it would cause tens of millions of Americans should it go away. So, apparently, his ego can't be deterred:
Most Republican politicians have now figured out that talking about health care is a political liability, so they’ve shut up about it.
In the 2022 midterms, for instance, health care was the
second-most-frequently featured topic in Democrats’ campaign ads (behind
abortion); in Republicans’ ads, health care did not even crack the top
20 issues, according to data from AdImpact.
Trump hasn’t gotten the message, though. Over the weekend, he declared on social media
that the failure to terminate Obamacare during his presidency “was a
low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!”
Given the popularity of Obamacare, Democrats are already seeing to it that the Malignant Loser's vow to "never give up" trying to end it is part of their 2024 strategy. They can include it with Republican plans to cut Medicare/ Medicaid and Social Security.
Of course, the pathological liar Malignant Loser and his cult in Congress repeatedly promised a super- duper replacement for Obamacare, but somehow it never materialized during his time in office. They don't need to be given any more chances.
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Photo illustration: Elizabeth Brockway / The Daily Beast)
