Hey Trump people, how is this one going to work out for you? Please, enlighten us as to the genius of his latest snafu in which his mouth opens and says something stupid before his brain can stop him. What level of chess is he playing at now? How many moves ahead is Trump thinking while the rest of us slap our forehead thinking, “How in the world did we get into this mess?”
The story is in the AP, but other news sources have confirmed it:
President Donald Trump told Republican senators Tuesday that the House-passed health care bill is “mean” and urged them to craft a version that is “more generous,” congressional sources said.
The president’s comments, at a White House lunch with 15 GOP senators, came as Senate Republican leaders’ attempts to write their own health care package have been slowed by disagreements between their party’s conservative and moderates.
Trump’s remarks were a surprising critique of a Republican-written House measure whose passage he lobbied for and praised. At a Rose Garden ceremony minutes after the bill’s narrow House passage, Trump called it “a great plan.”
His comments also seemed to undercut efforts by Senate conservatives to include restrictions in their chamber’s bill, such as cutting the Medicaid health care program for the poor and limiting the services insurers must cover. Moderate GOP senators have been pushing to ease those efforts.
The sources say the president did not specify what aspects of the bill he was characterizing.
The president likely cannot specify what aspects of the bill he was characterizing because he doesn’t know. The only thing he knows is what he watches on cable news, and naturally, he saw Democrats blasting the bill and went with that theme.
But what else should people expect from the supporter of single-payer health care and who promised to “cover everybody” during the campaign? A person not prone to sticking their foot in their mouth at every turn would know that any chance of a bill getting through both the House and Senate will have to go through a conference committee as there is almost zero chance of a Senate bill matching the current House bill.
That is particularly the case when the President of the United States undermines the very bill he celebrated in the Rose Garden a month earlier.
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