The fate of Donald Trump’s presidency may hinge on what he does next.
His failure to convert the core campaign promise of repealing and replacing Obamacare — even with a GOP monopoly on power in Washington — has left the White House reeling.
Trump and his advisers must now regroup and try to figure out how to avoid another legislative debacle on their next big issue, tax reform. They will do so knowing that a second failure could throttle his presidency.
Once, Trump’s aides viewed health care reform, presumably an easy early win, as a way to deliver momentum to his presidency and to build toward more sweeping change picked from his ambitious agenda.
But the effort’s ignominious defeat Friday has severely weakened the President, electrified Democrats and left Trump’s declarations that he is the ultimate dealmaker who can change Washington looking increasingly hollow.
Trump surprised some of those close to him with his reaction to Friday’s health care collapse. He did not vent or rage. Instead in the Oval Office afterward Trump was “sullen and quiet” as he contemplated his first blow, dealt by the Washington swamp he had vowed to drain, one insider source said.
The President was well aware he failed to deliver on an issue that stirs the passions of his political base. He was also mindful that the health care disaster would make his quest to tackle a behemoth tax package that much more difficult, the source said.
Indeed, the early failure means that hundreds of billions of dollars in federal savings that the White House had earmarked to bankroll a tax code overhaul are nowhere to be seen.
“It makes everything harder moving forward,” one Trump adviser said.
Another senior administration official told CNN’s Gloria Borger that tax reform could now have to be a “smaller version,” than originally planned and the problem would be explaining to the public that because the repeal of Obamacare didn’t happen, there’s “a trillion dollars less to deal with.”
Already casting an eye toward the midterm elections, which typically hurt the President’s own party, some of Trump’s advisers fear Obamacare’s underdog survival will provide a rallying point for their political foes.
“Democrats will feel emboldened and their base will feel emboldened,” a senior administration official said.
As the White House grasps for a bounce back strategy, his team must take another look at one of the most important questions that Trump faced when he took power, one lent more urgency by his humiliation over health care.
They must consider whether his brand as an outsider — with broad strokes politics that exacerbates grievances, has little time for dissenters and is anchored around his imposing, unpredictable personality — can actually prosper in Washington.
Ironically, it was the same forces of inertia and division in the capital that soured Trump’s voters on the political establishment and helped elevate him to power that combined to defeat him in his first legislative venture.
“I think what happened is that Washington won,” said Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney, in a frank moment Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“I think the one thing we learned this week is that Washington was a lot more broken than President Trump thought that it was,” said Mulvaney, adding “the status quo wins and, unfortunately, the folks back home lost.”
Mulvaney’s comments marked a stunning admission, given that he works for a President who brashly predicted he knew politics better than the politicians and would soon bring the city to heel with his negotiating flair and mastery of sealing a deal.
Instead, two-thirds of the way through his crucial First 100 days, Trump is nowhere near any significant legislative victory. And health care reform’s failure is not his only problem. His travel ban on citizens on a list of predominantly Muslim nations has twice been turned back by the courts. His budget, which features steep cuts in diplomacy spending to finance an increase for the military, is facing stiff resistance in Congress. A building intrigue over his campaign’s ties to Russia is clouding the White House’s mood.
It now appears that the most tangible success of Trump’s first months in office will be the expected confirmation of his Supreme Court pick, Judge Neil Gorsuch — though even that will further polarize Washington. Republicans are vowing to invoke the “nuclear option” by changing Senate rules so that Gorsuch can be confirmed with 51 votes, along party lines, rather than with the super-majority traditionally required for nominees to the nation’s top bench.
In one sense, it should not be surprising that Trump is struggling. He is the most inexperienced new president in history, and lacks the political networks and insider contacts that most commanders-in-chief take for granted when they take office.
Capitol Hill sources report that the President appeared unfamiliar with the in-depth details of the health care bill, as he tried to move votes in meetings with holdout Republican lawmakers.
And while his processor, Barack Obama, spent months marshaling Obamacare through Congress, Trump tried to ram through the repeal bill in a matter of weeks.
That was part of a White House strategy to get a fast start in the First 100 Days to create a shock-and-awe sense of momentum. But the tactic appears to have backfired — especially in the case of Obamacare and the travel ban where too little time was spent assessing the political and legal complexities and framing a coherent strategy.
Join GhanaStar.com to receive daily email alerts of breaking news in Ghana. GhanaStar.com is your source for all Ghana News. Get the latest Ghana news, breaking news, sports, politics, entertainment and more about Ghana, Africa and beyond.