UK Edition
Republican plans to repeal and replace Obamacare completed their death spiral on Monday night. Two more Republican senators said they could not support legislation that would effectively deny insurance to more than 20 million people during the next decade.
While the Russia scandal dominates headlines and has critics crying treason or impeachment, the healthcare debacle could prove far more damaging to this White House and its ability to get things – anything – done.
It exposes two of Mr Trump’s most fundamental failings: a deep misconception about life in modern America and an inability to understand how Washington works.
First, it is a well-known truism of American politics that once introduced and disseminated it is all but impossible to scrap an entitlement.
This is not new. Republicans have known this since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
So it is all very well denouncing Obamacare as socialism before it is introduced. It is fine and dandy to warn of the dangers of an expanding state and tax base while fretting that American workers will go soft.
But once voters have got used to the measures - the subsidies for healthcare and the security of knowing that their insurance covers everything they might reasonably need – and discovered there are no Reds under the hospital beds, it becomes all but impossible to return things to the old ways.
During the past month a string of opinion polls have borne out this law of politics. For the first time since it was introduced, Obamacare is now popular with a majority of the population.
The second misconception is perhaps more worrying for Mr Trump and his supporters who celebrated putting the ultimate negotiator into the White House: This President is struggling to master the art of the Washington deal.
Senators would simply not fall into line behind the health proposals. Cajoling and threats did not help. As a result, the President is reportedly mystified that his Congressional leadership would not simply thrash out a compromise and bring him a big fat win to sign.
They, for their part, don’t understand why their President never bothered to get his head around the intricacies of healthcare legislation and help tweak the ideas. Instead of using his populist mandate to sell their proposals to a sceptical country, he resorted to his Twitter bully pulpit to harangue senators into passing a flawed bill.
And therein lies the problem. Mr Trump is still trying to run the government like his business. He doesn’t understand that Congress is not just separate from his White House but in many ways is set up in opposition to him.
On Tuesday morning, he showed that he still doesn’t get it, using Twitter to blame lack of loyalty among senators for the bill’s failure.
That’s not how it works. It is time that Mr Trump learned that congressmen and women are not his employees.
Donald Trump's ignorance means Obamacare is going nowhere