President Trump [sic] is having a tough week. The “repeal and replace Obamacare” operation
is running into trouble because Obamacare (i.e., the Affordable Care Act) was
designed to help poor Americans get and keep insurance while the GOP replacement
plan is designed to make the rich and powerful richer and more powerful. This
fact should not be a surprise since the rich and powerful are the Republicans’
favorite charity (about $33,000 in tax cuts for the one percent, $197,000 for the one
tenth of one percent in the Republican health care proposal). What is surprising is Mr. Trump’s refusal to call the
GOP plan “Trumpcare.” I’m not sure why. Maybe he’s just modest about putting
his name on big expensive things.
Now perhaps you believe the GOP is making a good
faith effort to help poor Americans keep their health insurance. And perhaps
you are an idiot. The fact is Republicans hate Obamacare for three reasons; first,
it makes insurance affordable to poor Americans by providing them with
subsidies - which in GOP-speak is “a government takeover of health care;”
second, once established Americans were certain to like it, or, as Senator Ted
Cruz said in 2013, Americans were bound to “get addicted to the sugar” of
Obamacare and therefore it would never be repealed; and third, it was President
Obama’s signature program. This was the most damning feature of all, given that
GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell had stated that the Republicans’ primary goal
was to ensure that Obama failed as a president.
But Trumpcare (or Ryancare or Billionairecare or
whatever) is in trouble now since conservative Republicans say it isn’t
generous enough to the super-rich and moderate Republicans say that taking away
insurance from 24 million Americans would make it hard for them to get
re-elected.
And Trumpcare isn’t The Donald’s only problem. Just
yesterday federal judges began telling him that his travel ban on six Muslim
nations (whose citizens have been responsible for no terrorist attacks in the
U.S.) is unconstitutional. Admittedly, Mr. Trump was facing a delicate problem
here. Putting together a carefully constructed travel ban whose provisions
would appeal to his base (which is chock full of anti-Muslim bigots), but
making it seem to be totally unrelated to religious discrimination is not an
easy thing to do. As President Obama said, being president is hard, and Mr.
Trump seems to be starting to get that.
Making the job even harder is his having to deal
with imaginary wiretaps. Just because they only exist in Mr. Trump’s head doesn’t
make it any easier for him to endure them. I guess I shouldn’t say the wiretaps
exist only in his head, because he did find them referenced on Breitbart or
Bigots-R-Us or some other such “news” source that he likes to rely on. And think
about this: just how hard is it going to be for Trump to handle the presidency
when he starts seeing imaginary assassination squads coming after him?
As Americans, we naturally have to be concerned
about the Trump presidency. Especially because we now face a growing nuclear threat
from another national leader even more dishonest, deluded, and psychologically
unstable than President Trump: North Korea’s Kim Jong-un.
Maybe it’s just me, but I firmly believe that it
is a crime for someone who is entirely unfit for the presidency to actually run
for president. The question is, can we consider it the kind of high crime or
misdemeanor that is the necessary basis for impeachment?
Happy St. Patrick’s Day, everyone.
