Reportedly, President Trump’s latest strategy as I write this is to let the Democrats own the ACA, let it fail, and hang it around their necks, under the mask of the Democrats having to go to the GOP to rebuild healthcare. A sound strategy?
There’s more than one risk, though. Assuming the ACA doesn’t fail – and remember that many analysts have reviewed the numbers and concluded the entire death spiral meme is false, including those at Trump’s own Health and Human Services Department – there’s the obvious risk that then the Democrats get to own the successful ACA. But this is just spite.
The real risk is that at the same time the GOP will be seen as having repudiated the ACA, refused ownership. And this is worse than it sounds because the entire reason the GOP has been trying to repeal the ACA has been entirely about the Democrats having been able to take credit for one of the largest social programs since Social Security – and the GOP feared that would make them irrelevant.
That is, the GOP has an existential fear of the ACA, of becoming irrelevant and, eventually, non-existent. And this is exactly what Trump will have embraced. He’s betting he can cause the ACA to fail, to do it without the citizenry noticing that he caused it, all against the GOP becoming an embarrassing, irrelevant political curiosity.
And, given the incompetence of the Trump Administration, well, if I were in the GOP, I’d be shaking in my shoes.
