I didn’t want to start another Trump thread so I’m going to post here, even though Trump hasn’t pissed me off today. In fact, I’m still tickled about the health care debacle.
And as I read the details I realized something.
Trump is a lousy negotiator. Horrible.
I’m starting to think his children make all his deals in advance, then pay the client extra to sit at a table and let Daddy come in and do his incomprehensible negotiation routine.
First, to negotiate you have to know your product. And you have to have a clearly defined goal - not " to get 52 votes" or " to get to yes" or “to pass the bill”. OK, this wasn’t the slam dunk it should have been. You actually had two factions at the table. The goal should have been to give a steep financial cut to the Freedom Caucus while finding a warm and fuzzy but value neutral or really cheap offset to the moderate Republicans. That’s no guarantee that you’ll get to yes but you need a roadmap to get there.
But you have to know your product to know where the concessions are hidden. The bill was impossible to parse and he probably didn’t have the humility or patience to request a detailed line by line briefing.
But the ineptness aside, he made two serious mistakes. He let his nasty thin skinned vindictiveness get the better of him with Mark Meadows and he made a “joking” threat, ruining any chance he had of getting Meadows vote. And hecallowed that unholy lifelike embodiment of his butthole, Steve Bannon to play the bully and try to push his way to yes.
But the ineptitude is astounding considering that was supposed to be his primary strength.
The Congressmen were there ready to hear the elected Leader give them a reason or excuse to go along. Instead some glorified hired spear-carrier tells them “you’re gonna do this because we say you’re gonna do it, or else”.
For years the GOP have talked about repeal and replace, but have been very cagey about the replace part, since the “limited government” side and the “I don’t want to piss off my constituents who have gotten used to health coverage” side were never going to see eye to eye.
Into that wades Trump with promises to cut costs, without cutting coverage, and without the personal mandate, and of course that that it will be oh, so simple. A planet-sized cherry on top of the moon on a stick.
There was no way to negotiate his way out of that mess.
I just wish we could actually see all the panic and frustration, instead of merely infering it at this point.
I don’t recall the republicans talking about replace until it looked like they were going to win everything. All I recall hearing is repeal, repeal, repeal.
Really, there’s nowhere for republicans to go on healthcare.
They have two options: argue that we should go back to before obamacare, and that the government should not help ensure that people can get health care; or find a solution to the left of Obamacare. Neither is an option for them - the latter fundamentally betrays their guiding philosophy for the last 8 years; the former is, as we firmly established with the AHCA, political suicide. This is what happens when you spend 8 years lying about your position.
Eh, any official WH photo of FLOTUS (why should there BE an “official WH photo of FLOTUS” at all is a different story) is essentially a publicity shot. I’ll give her a break on that. And it may have been the Combover In Chief who chose this, anyway.
In an effort to undo every positive accomplishment of his predecessor, Trump puts all police reformon hold until he can “review” it to make sure that it doesn’t “work against the Trump administration’s goals of promoting officer safety and morale while fighting violent crime.”
Training police officers to understand that not all black people should be assumed to be criminals, or that it is better to try to deescalate a situation rather than come in guns blazing, might annoy some of them who just want to keep doing things like they always were, and so we can’t possibly have that.
I think it is literally true that the only things Trump has accomplished is un-doing Obama’s work. He has contributed zero zip nada zilch bupkis of his own initiatives.