Health care bill a costly lesson
Trump’s haste and failure to build consensus imperiling rest of agenda
WASHINGTON — Driven by an obsession for a quick win and failing to grasp the complexities of an issue that has bedeviled politicians for generations, President Donald Trump learned last week that the negotiating tricks and power plays he honed in business don’t translate into the messy world of Congress.
“Political experience is a hard teacher,” said Rick Tyler, a former adviser to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and House Speaker Newt Gingrich. “It gives the test first and the lesson later.”
Trump’s failure to push through the GOP-led Affordable Care Act overhaul could deeply wound his relationship with Congress and undermine his ability to pursue other items on his agenda, including rewriting the tax code, building a border wall and launching a $1 trillion program to rebuild the nation’s bridges and other infrastructure.
A vote on the measure was pulled Friday when it became apparent it did not have the support needed for passage.
People around Trump have said he is motivated by a desire to fulfill campaign promises quickly. But haste and the failure to build consensus helped sink Trump’s first major legislative initiative.
Excessive speed was not the only problem.
Michael Needham, CEO of Heritage Action for America, a leading political force on the right, described the initial bill unveiled in early March as “an incoherent set of policies that didn’t have a constituency” in any faction of the GOP.
The new president also met a new reality that he had not encountered in the business world: a multitude of politicians, each with separate constituencies, power bases and political requirements. In business and in government, he has shown a strong preference for dealing with one person at a time.
Many lawmakers said they appreciated Trump’s efforts to make the sale. But others were frustrated.
“We know this wasn’t the No. 1 item on the president’s agenda, and it’s not an issue where the White House led,” said Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican who holds one of the most vulnerable seats in Congress and supported the bill in committee. “The bill was born in the House with very little input from the administration because they just weren’t ready.”
Moreover, Trump was trying to retrofit a complex system with a set of tweaks that had little ideological consistency.
“Nobody knew health care could be so complicated,” he told the nation’s governors a week before the GOP legislation was released — a remark that startled virtually everyone who had ever touched the subject and encapsulated many of the problems he encountered.
Forty minutes after the health care bill was yanked amid chaos Friday, Trump framed the loss in educational terms, and issued a veiled threat to those members of his party who let him down.
“We learned a lot about loyalty, and we learned a lot about the vote-getting process,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
Even before the fight ended, Trump’s allies were pushing blame to House Speaker Paul Ryan.“He presented the president with a damaged bill of goods,” Christopher Ruddy, a Trump friend who publishes the conservative website Newsmax, said in an interview.
Trump’s lack of a deeply held ideology and low poll numbers made his sales job tougher with lawmakers, said Tyler. He had not fought prior political battles with these lawmakers, raised money with them or campaigned on their behalf.
“You can’t get this kind of thing done on the weight of your personality,” Tyler said.
Trump is more familiar with the negotiating style of the real-estate business in which he made his fortune. He believed he could win the best deal by seeking out the most powerful person in the room and dominating them in a one-on-one, said Gwenda Blair, a Trump biographer. That formula translated well in the presidential campaign, when Trump successfully picked off his Republican rivals, and then Democrat Hillary Clinton, one at a time.
But that approach is impossible in Congress, especially in a Republican Party that is balkanized into factions that have been unable to coalesce around a single set of principles.
“Congress, there’s 535 people with their own power bases,” Blair said. “That’s a lot of moving parts.”
Some Republicans insisted anything short of a complete repeal of Obamacare would signal surrender to the liberal agenda. Others worried that constituents who have grown accustomed to subsidies and Medicaid under the current system would rebel if that were taken away. And all of those factions had to live under Trump’s own ambitious promise that he could create a system that was at once cheaper, more accessible and higher in quality — all without busting the federal budget.
Trump tried to remain philosophical Friday as he told reporters that he would move on to other priorities. It seemed he was taking a lesson from his book, “The Art of the Deal.”
“I never get too attached to one deal or one approach,” he wrote. “I keep a lot of balls in the air, because most deals fall out, no matter how promising they seem at first.”
But the book offered a note of caution that may serve Trump as he makes his next pitch to Congress:
“If you can’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”