The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House was crammed as usual, but there was an extra frisson of suspense. As White House press secretary Sean Spicer walked to the lectern, a conversation was unfolding just 27 paces away in the Oval Office. It would invalidate almost everything he said.
US House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan told US President Donald Trump the news he did not want to hear. Weeks of cajoling and arm-twisting to win over skeptics of their healthcare reform legislation had failed.
Ryan asked the president to ditch the bill and avoid the humiliation of putting it to a vote in the House. Trump agreed.
Illustration: Mountain People
It was a chastening defeat for a president whose election campaign was built on his reputation as a negotiator and a winner. His book, The Art of the Deal, brags: “Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.”
When it came to his first major legislation as president and the question “deal or no deal,” the answer was, emphatically, no deal.
In a poetic twist, the president who has espoused a right-wing agenda of economic nationalism, law and order and “America first” was undone by the right wing of his own party.
Conservatives said the bill did not go far enough to repeal and replace former US president Barack Obama’s signature healthcare policy, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
“Today was a big win for the president. The 44th president, Barack Obama,” TV host Lawrence O’Donnell said on MSNBC. “And it was, to put it in Trump-speak, a complete disaster for the current president.”
It came hard on the heels of two legal knock-backs to his attempt to ban travelers from certain Muslim-majority counties. That policy too was imposed with a missionary zeal that masked a lack of competence and grasp of detail.
However, Trump appears to be playing the role of a chief executive intent on shaking up a business and his chief strategist, Steve Bannon, is said to admire a creed from the tech sector in Silicon Valley: “Move fast and break things.”
However, Washington politics are different. Add in the Russia affair — the resignation of the president’s national security adviser, groundless claims of wiretapping against Obama and an ongoing FBI investigation into Trump’s associates — and the first two months of the Trump presidency reek of chaos, crisis and confusion.
In his rambunctious election campaign, the 70-year-old novice promised to repeal and replace Obamacare “immediately.”
It was a bad choice for an opening offensive. Healthcare reform is to US presidents what the Russian winter was to Napoleon. Obama got further than most, but even then the notion of a US National Health Service remained a distant dream.
With Republicans controlling both the US Senate and House, Trump should have had the cards in his favor. In what US Democrats regarded as an act of spite, he and Ryan set a deadline to erase Obamacare on its seventh anniversary, March 23. They would supplant it with the slimmer American Health Care Act (AHCA).
However, as the negotiations gathered steam, it was clearly not going to be plain sailing.
Last month, Trump said: “Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject. Nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated.”
The bill was, in the eyes of many, rushed and deeply flawed, falling well short of Trump’s campaign pledge to provide insurance for everyone.
Grassroots protests erupted across the country, with citizen advocates hitting the telephones and constituents berating congressmen at town hall events. Groups representing hospitals and medical professionals derided the legislation. The nonpartisan US Congressional Budget Office estimated that the AHCA would lead to 24 million fewer Americans having health insurance over the next 10 years.
The bill achieved the rare feat of uniting the far-left and far-right in opposition.
The biggest holdouts in Republican ranks were the hardline conservatives of the House Freedom Caucus. Trump tried to woo them with White House bowling sessions and trips on Air Force One.
In the final week, he made a desperate bid to prove his credentials as “the closer,” offering concessions such as the removal of 10 so-called essential health benefits, including maternity care and emergency services.
However, by Thursday last week, the supposed day of the vote, the wheels were coming off. Trump digressed, greeting commercial truckers at the White House, climbing into the cab of a 18-wheeler to pose at the wheel and honk the horn.
Apparently unaware that the vote had just been postponed until Friday, he said: “It’s going to be a very close vote.”
Meanwhile, the scramble continued. Bannon and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus were dispatched to Capitol Hill to try and turn the doubters.
Spicer on Friday told reporters that more than 120 members of the House had had a visit, call or meeting at the White House in the past few days.
Trump had been making calls from 6am to 11pm, he said.
However, even as the press secretary put on a brave face: “Why don’t we continue with a very positive, optimistic Friday?” he said. “The sun is coming out, I feel really good,” Trump and Ryan were about to agree the terms of surrender.
The speaker’s funereal expression as he left the White House spoke volumes.
Republicans, who voted more than 60 times to repeal or alter Obamacare over the past few years only to be vetoed by Obama, had their big chance and blew it. The party’s deep ideological and factional divisions, temporarily papered over amid the euphoria of the surprise electoral win in November last year, were back with a vengeance as it struggled to go from opposition to governance.
About 1km away, tourists crowded under the magnificent dome of the US Capitol building. As they filed out of the rotunda they saw, outside Ryan’s office, clutches of reporters trading gossip and making mental tallies of votes. Any passing House member was asked eagerly which way they were leaning. The corridors of power in one of the world’s biggest democracies teemed with life.
Trump announced the pulling of the bill in calls to the Washington Post and New York Times.
Soon after, digesting the biggest defeat of his career, Ryan admitted that Obamacare would remain in place for the foreseeable future, although he claimed it was in a state of collapse — something Democrats fiercely dispute.
The minority party, traumatized by former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s shock defeat, finally had something to cheer.
They called it a a moment to “breathe a sigh of relief” for the American people.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said sarcastically: “So much for The Art of the Deal.”
The Democrats might have been right about the merits of Obamacare, and the havoc that would have been wrought by “Trumpcare,” but Friday’s debacle might yet be a blessing in disguise for the president.
Bob Shrum, a Democratic consultant and politics professor at the University of Southern California, said: “The truth is it might have been worse for him had it passed, because he would have faced a potentially devastating midterm election.”
“It’s clear from what he said he was not that personally invested in this. He felt he was obligated to do it for the party. I think his preference was to go first on taxes and maybe infrastructure. The way forward would be to push taxes and then take a leaf out of [former US president] Ronald Reagan’s book and work with Democrats on infrastructure,” Shrum said.
Trump has said tax reform is next, and years of Republican planning might allow for that legislation to pass more easily.
However, his ability to work with Congress is in grave question. His unique selling point, as a dealmaker, has taken a huge hit.
Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer, said of Trump’s supporters: “They voted for a guy who could fix it, the CEO, on The Apprentice for 10 years, who could make a deal with anybody.”
However, the tactics that served Trump so well in business — playing the alpha male, holding one-on-one meetings — did not translate to politics, she said.
“Now he’s up against 535 other people [in the House and Senate], other people who have their own independent power base and are not really interested in rolling over. The model of taking one person in a room and beating up on them doesn’t work with 535,” Blair said.
Friday’s failure was a fillip for the anti-Trump “resistance,” but it was hardly grounds for complacency. The president looks set to press ahead with his agenda on everything from rolling back Obama-era protections on the environment to building a wall on the Mexican border to firing off tweets that alienate allies and embolden enemies.
He might also ensure that his prediction of Obamacare’s explosion becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Move fast and break things” will continue, even it if means breaking his own party.
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