So much for all that winning: Will the health care debacle expose the fraudulent nature of Trump’s presidency? – Salon

In early DecemberI wrote a piecerecountingall of President Barack Obamas attempts to woo Republicans and wondered whether members of the Tea Party represented by the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus would save Obamacare by once again refusing to go along with the GOPs leadership. And by gosh, they went and did it again. By all accounts, the Freedom Caucuswouldnt accept Paul Ryans draconian replacement for Obamacare because its members didnt merely wish to return to the time before theAffordable Care Act was enacted; they wanted to take the health care system back to the time of Dickensian England.

Mainstream conservatives, on the other hand, were willing to deny millions of people health care but figured that their seats might be in jeopardy if they went as far as the Freedom Caucus demanded. This bill died the way that everything dies in the Republican Congress at the hands of fanatics who will not take yes for an answer.

The best meme circulating on Twitter during the negotiations was this one:

Speaker Paul Ryan deserves the lions share of the blame for this debacle. Hes the allegedly serious wonk who was supposed to be able to whip up a quick replacement in a matter of days that House Republicanscould get through on reconciliation in the Senate with 50 votes, Trump would sign it and victory would be at hand in no time. That didnt work out. Ryans alleged grasp of policy was always a Beltway delusion, largely based on his love of Atlas Shrugged and those blue, blue eyes. The health care bill he slapped together was a monstrosity that failed on every level, from cost savings to coverage, and it pleased absolutely no one. The train wreck of a negotiationprocess shows that Ryan is just as bad at political leadership as he is at policy.

Inan insightful piece in The Atlantic about the GOPsinability to pass such an important piece of legislation,McCay Coppins observed that the party has been avoiding governance for nearly a decade and simply no longer knows how to do it. He wrote:

Indeed, without any real expectation of their bills actually being enacted, the legislative process mutated into a platform for point-scoring, attention-getting, and brand-building. At its most benign, this dynamic manifested itself in performative filibusters and symbolic votes that had no meaningful effect beyond raising a senators profile or appeasing the cable news-watching constituents back home.

That certainly explains why GOP voters were so ready to cast their ballotsfor Donald Trump as president. He is obviously the leader the party was waiting for.

I mentioned the other day that when Obama ran on fixing Washington and bringing people together, the Republicans came up with aclever plan to obstruct him at every turn and then crow that he failed to fulfill his promise. It worked pretty well. Obama spent his entire first term trying to reach out to Republicans to no avail, but even today its an article of faith on the right that Obama was divisive.

After the repeal and replace debacle, we can see there is a corollary with Trump. He didnt promise to bring people together but rather ran on a simple platform of winning. He was supposed to be the guy who could just walk into any room and hammer out a deal so fast it would make our heads spin.He claimedhe had a method of defeating ISIS quickly and effectively and having total victory. Hewould build that wall and make Mexico pay for it. He would immediately tear up all the existing trade deals and negotiate new ones on Americas terms. In fact, he was going to win so much in every way that wed get sick of all the winning and beg him to stop.

And against all odds through an anachronistic constitutional fluke, Trump won the Electoral College vote despite coming up millions of votes short in the popular count the real measure of his popularity. It was a win that wasnt really a win, and he clearly knows it. As president, Trump has suffered one defeat after another. From the disaster of his travel ban to the fiasco of the health care strategy and the Michael Flynn debacle (as well as the ongoing Russia scandal), his new administration is a catastrophic fail so far. The question now is when his voters are going to realize that Trump is not the winner he said he was.

Many people knew this before he was elected, including some Republicans:

After the House leadership pulled the halth care billfrom being votedon Friday, this quote from Trumps book The Art of the Deal made the rounds on social media:

You cant con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press and you can throw in a little hyperbole, But if you dont deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

But that book wasnt written by Trump. It was written by his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz. Trumps real belief is that when you dont deliver the goods, let them sue and get them agree to take pennies on the dollar. When you fail, always blame someone else.

Trump had signaled throughout the health care debatethat he didnt really want to deliver anything at all. He said he believed the best thing to do was lethealth care deteriorate so that people would blame the Democrats. On his terms then, he won.

And Trump actually loses a lot in life. He goes bankrupt and issued and exposed as a fake and fraud with alarming frequency. He constantly lives on the edge of self-destruction, and when he iscaught, he dances away by blaming others. Indeed, except for having been born wealthy, Trump isnt a winner at all. Hes asurvivor,which is not what hes been selling. And he might survive as president. The question is whether the country will survive as well. Its already obvious that the nationwont be winning.

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So much for all that winning: Will the health care debacle expose the fraudulent nature of Trump's presidency? - Salon