… Trump sounded more clipped and less jaunty on the call than he did during the discursive chats I had with him last year on the campaign trail. The business of governing had little to do with any trade he had previously practiced. In Congress, he was grappling with an […] Read more »
The Two Cracks In The Republican Party
Donald Trump promised to come to Washington and get government working again. But the stunning failure of President Trump and Paul Ryan’s first legislative priority, the American Health Care Act, reveals that he underestimated a unique fracture of the modern Republican Party. Yes, moderate and very conservative Republicans were against […] Read more »
With his presidency off course, what will Trump learn from the health-care debacle?
Sixty-five days do not ultimately define a presidency, especially the first 65 of a new president’s first term. That’s as true for President Trump as for other presidents who suffered early setbacks. But without some serious stocktaking inside the White House after the failed effort to replace the Affordable Care […] Read more »
Why Wasn’t Obamacare Repealed? The Answer Is the Party, Not the President
… While it’s certainly true that both the president and the speaker made mistakes in handling the health care issue, it’s inaccurate to portray the demise of the AHCA as primarily a consequence of individual failures of leadership or strategy. … The real obstacle to the passage of health care […] Read more »
Why Republicans were in such a hurry on health care
Why were Republicans rushing to vote on a health-care plan that they’d barely finished drafting, that budget scorekeepers hadn’t had a chance to fully evaluate, and that, insofar as people did know about it, was widely despised? In part, it’s because their plan was so unpopular and because it got […] Read more »
Trump Becomes Ensnared in Fiery G.O.P. Civil War
President Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him. A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washington’s usual rules and consequences […] Read more »