Health care failure may not hurt Trump

7/21

USA TODAY

Donovan Slack57 mins ago

Leah Remini on Why She 'Fell In Love' With Kevin James

'King of Queens' reunion!

© Provided by USA Today WASHINGTON — He tweeted it in 2011: “Know when to walk away from the table."
That’s precisely what President Trump did on the Republican legislation largely repealing and replacing Obamacare. He shut down negotiations Thursday night and on Friday, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., pulled the bill from consideration.
While conventional wisdom might say it was akin to a loss on his first legislative push as president, political operatives and analysts say Trump and his fortunes have rarely lined up with convention.
“I don’t necessarily think at the end of the day, this is going to be a great failure of the presidency like many will suggest,” said Craig Robinson, founder and editor of TheIowaRepublican.com. “I think Trump’s going to use this to kind of show that he’s separate from the Congress, and if you want to put heat on people to do something, put it on them.”
But Trump did repeat over and over on the campaign trail that he would repeal Obamacare, so the failure to get it done will have some impact. The bill was drafted by Republican lawmakers led by Ryan and not the White House, but Trump “did wrap his arms around it,” said Lilly Goren, political science professor at Carroll University in Wisconsin.
"And he said, you know, this is what we're going to work on, this is what we're going to get passed, and I'm the deal maker, and so I'm going to make the deals to move this through," she said. "And so he can't quite completely disassociate himself from it."
Trump worked the phones for days, held numerous meetings with lawmakers, and even provided concessions to conservative Republicans who said the legislation didn’t go far enough.
“He’s left everything on the field when it comes to this bill,” press secretary Sean Spicer said earlier Friday. “The president has been working throughout the week on this… Over 120 members have personally had a visit, call or a meeting here at the White House in the past few days.”
The bill, dubbed the American Health Care Act, would have replaced large swaths of the Affordable Care Act, including requirements that individuals maintain insurance at all times and that larger companies provide it to employees. It kept intact provisions that allow children to stay on their parents plans until age 26 and prohibit insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions.
In a last-ditch effort to win over conservative Republicans on Friday morning, House leaders added changes negotiated by Trump and House Republicans that would have, among other things, eliminated minimum requirements for insurance plans to cover 10 "essential health benefits," including maternity care, emergency room trips and prescription drugs.
But some hard-liners from the influential Freedom Caucus, who met with Trump on Thursday and whose votes were key for passage, still weren’t on board and there weren't enough votes to pass the bill so Ryan pulled it.
Trump, who approved the move, will likely emerge relatively unscathed, Robinson predicted.
“Trump’s a much different type of president than we’ve had in the past, obviously,” he said. “I think he will walk away. How long? We don’t know.”
Helmut Norpoth, a political science professor at Stony Brook University — and one of the few to predict Trump’s win last year — said he also believes the fate of the bill doesn’t presage the failure of the rest of his legislative agenda, and Trump may be better off moving on to his next priority, a tax overhaul.
“Clearly the Republican Party as a whole would be much more receptive to vote on tax reform,” Norpoth said. “On taxes, I think they’re probably more in line with what he wants to do so I don’t think they would necessarily torpedo that.”
But missing the mark on health care adds another negative notch in Trump's barely two-month-old presidency, which has frequently been enveloped by controversies, some of Trump's own making. Goren said it does "snowball the narrative" that he has a "rocky" administration, and continues the "conversations that a lot of people are having."
"It's like: What's the agenda? What are we concentrating on? What is the president advocating for, where's the emphasis? Who's leading?" she said. "We continue to bounce from one issue to another."
From crowd sizes, voter fraud and wire-tapping, to his first travel ban, then his second and the courts that held them up, not to mention the resignation of his national security adviser, the list is long.
"And now we're, we have had, earlier this week, (FBI) Director Comey, so we we're talking about Russia, then intelligence; Now we're back to health care," she said. "And as the president, there isn't a clear message coming from the White House."