Donald Trump Has Obamacare On The Brain
After Trump seemed to confuse Joe Biden with Barack Obama, Trump has confounded many with his newfound focus on repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act.
Donald Trump keeps telling us what he intends to do if he wins a second presidential term.
First there was Project 2025, which laid out Trump’s authoritarian vision for the country.
Then he promised to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office and send the military to the southern border.
He’s also pledged to use the levers of government to retaliate against his political foes.
Oh, and reinstate his Muslim travel ban.
And now, he’s vowing to…{checks notes}...repeal and replace Obamacare.
Yes, that’s right, Trump is highlighting one of the biggest failures of his term in office by pledging once again to try to repeal Obamacare.
The campaign promise no one asked for.
Well, this appears to be just the latest example in a bizarre new trend: Barack Obama living rent-free in Donald Trump’s head.
Remember all those times this fall when Trump confused Obama with Biden?
Trump, of course, has always tended to make verbal gaffes when giving speeches, particularly when he goes off script. Yet while the slightest gaffe on Biden’s part is touted as a sign of decline, for Trump it’s just who he is, a maddening double standard that has frustrated many of us.
But what is with Trump’s apparent obsession with Obama and his renewed commitment to unraveling Obamacare? Is it just the latest rantings of a crazy man’s shambolic campaign? Or is he crazy like a fox?
Donald Trump Seems Confused About Who Is President
As we have seen for years, one of Donald Trump’s favorite hits against President Biden is to suggest that he is in cognitive decline.
But in recent months, Trump has drawn questions about his own mental fitness as he has repeatedly referred to President Biden as “Obama,” leading people to think Trump is—at best—a bit confused.
As Forbes notes, between September and November, Trump got the two men confused at least 7 times:
Speaking from New Hampshire Saturday, Trump, recounting a recent interview he watched of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said Orban was asked “what would you advise President Obama? The whole world seems to be exploding.”
Trump also referenced Obama when he clearly meant Biden, at a rally in Ottumwa, Iowa, on October 1, twice in a Fox News Radio interview on October 11 and three times during a September 15 speech before faith leaders in Washington.
It even got to the point where Trump felt the need to respond to the chatter, claiming on Truth Social that he is not confused, it’s totally on purpose, and he’s just being “sarcastic.”
Whenever I sarcastically insert the name Obama for Biden as an indication that others may actually be having a very big influence in running our Country, Ron DeSanctimonious and his failing campaign apparatus, together with the Democrat’s Radical Left “Disinformation Machine,” go wild saying that “Trump doesn’t know the name of our President, (CROOKED!) Joe Biden. He must be cognitively impaired.” No, I know both names very well, never mix them up, and know that they are destroying our Country.
You see, it’s because Barack Obama is really pulling the strings in the Biden administration. Because another absurd right-wing conspiracy theory is just what 2023 needed.
But if you watch Trump glitch out in his September speech to faith leaders, where he says Obama erroneously three times in under a minute, there is clearly nothing intentional about it. It’s as if he just can’t bring himself to say the phrase “President Biden,” as though that would be an admission that he lost the presidency.
Which he did.
So, in order to get people off the topic of Trump being bizarrely fixated on Obama, what does Trump do?
Why, pledge to repeal and replace Obamacare of course!
On November 25th, Trump declared:
The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives. We had a couple of Republican Senators who campaigned for 6 years against it, and then raised their hands not to terminate it. It was a low point for the Republican Party, but we should never give up!
The Biden campaign responded immediately with condemnations, and Trump’s GOP allies in Congress had to dodge questions from reporters about whether they favored repeal of the ACA.
So in late-night Truth Social posts on Nov. 28th, Trump sought to clarify:
Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration. It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!
And:
I don’t want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!
A stable genius, indeed.
What Was Trump Thinking?
So, why did Trump relaunch his years-old crusade against Obamacare seemingly out of nowhere?
One could posit several theories as to his reasoning:
Trump just really wanted to double down on his insistence that he wasn’t confused, that he really meant to say Obama all those times rather than Biden and Obamacare is the one manifestation of Obama that Trump can credibly run against.
Trump wanted to rile up his racist base by giving them a villain to hate since Biden is just an old White guy like them.
Since Joe Biden has successfully implemented policies that Trump failed at including an infrastructure bill, manufacturing expansion, and reduction of drug prices, Trump would rather run against a policy that Republicans have traditionally opposed, rather than quite popular policies passed by Biden.
But no matter Trump’s rationale, it does appear this is politically perilous for the former president for multiple reasons.
It Represents One Of Trump’s Biggest Failures
In 2017, Donald Trump had a Republican House and Senate, and repealing Obamacare was top of the agenda. After easily passing the House, Trump’s attempt at repealing Obamacare famously went down in flames in the U.S. Senate on July 28, 2017, as John McCain’s famous thumbs down served as the decisive vote.
While Trump could be rolling his latest pitch to do away with Obamacare as an example of WHY voters should give him another term, i.e., to “finish the job,” it really only serves as a reminder of one of Trump’s most prominent campaign promises that he failed to deliver on, his “promises made, promises kept” sloganeering in 2020 notwithstanding.
Much like building the wall and having Mexico pay for it, and ending the war in Afghanistan, the promise to repeal Obamacare was one of Trump’s most spectacular failures.
From the perspective of 2023, Trump calls that moment in 2017 “...a low point for the Republican Party.” Ignoring of course that as the President at the time, he was the putative leader of the Republican Party. It was a low point for his presidency, and demonstrated Trump’s inability to follow through on his promises.
So yes, by all means remind voters of it a year out from the 2024 general election!
Obamacare Is Popular
Another reason this is a potentially damaging move is that Trump blindsided his fellow Republicans in Congress, many of whom have absolutely no interest in revisiting Obamacare, now that tens of millions of Americans rely upon it for their healthcare.
And now that the law enjoys 59% approval (40% disapprove.)
A new KFF poll confirms that re-litigating the ACA would benefit Democrats:
Once a longstanding issue for the Republican Party, former President Trump has recently resurrected the debate around the future of the 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Surveyed prior to this discussion, Democratic voters are more than twice as likely as Republicans voters to say the future of the ACA is a “very important” issue for the candidates to discuss (70% v. 32%).
The Democratic Party holds an advantage on which party voters trust to do a better job of handling the ACA with six in ten (59%) voters saying they trust the Democratic Party more, compared to four in ten (39%) who say they trust the Republican Party more.
In fact, as Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post notes, the current popularity of the law began to grow right after it was threatened by Trump in 2017.
And as Rampell notes, it’s not an accident that Democrats retook the House in 2018 largely on a message of “promising to safeguard health coverage.”
It’s also not an accident that red states are increasingly opting into the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, with North Carolina being the latest to do so this year.
In July 2017, only 32 states plus Washington D.C. had opted into Medicaid expansion under the ACA. As of today, that number is up to 41, with only 10 states still opting out.
In short:
Most Republican politicians have now figured out that talking about health care is a political liability, so they’ve shut up about it.
But nope, not Trump.
It’s A Gift To Democrats
Perhaps most bizarrely, Trump is doing this just as polls have shown him gaining traction among younger voters and voters of color.
Over the summer and early fall, many of us watched slack-jawed as poll after poll showed Trump tied with or leading President Biden. One reason for that, remarkably, has been due to, as The Washington Post puts it:
Trump performing historically well among Black and Hispanic voters.
The Post elaborated:
Across five high-quality polls that have broken out non-White voters in the past month, Trump is averaging 20 percent of Black voters and 42 percent of Hispanic voters.
Both numbers — and especially that for Black voters — could set modern-day records for a Republican in a presidential election. Trump in 2020 took just 8 percent of Black voters and 36 percent of Hispanic voters
Yet here Trump is suggesting he will strip away healthcare that many of these voters rely on. Trump is also signaling his desire to undo the signature accomplishment of a popular president whom these same voters likely enthusiastically supported.
Democrats rightly see this as the political gift that it is. And they have signaled they are going to make hay out of Trump’s pledge to revisit the popular law.
In fact, the Biden campaign recently produced an ad focused on health care, with the message “We can’t go back.”
With polls showing the public is largely unaware of President Biden’s successful fights to cap out-of-pocket insulin costs and to reduce prescription drug prices, it’s clear Team Biden welcomes the chance to put healthcare at the top of the 2024 agenda. As should all Democrats.
In other words, bring it on, Donald.
Have have to keep this message about the Affordable Care Act in the forefront of the upcoming campaigns. Trump is going to run out of feet if he keeps shooting himself in the foot.
I'll never forget, right after the Bloated Yam was in office, and he'd said he would kill off the Affordable Care Act on his first day, his epiphanic phrase: "I never thought it would be so hard to reform health care."
It was the first time in his life that something had been "hard for him" since he tried to open the hasps on the back of his girlfriend's bra.