Trump sidesteps bully pulpit in GOP push to pass health care bill
With the Republican push to revamp the Affordable Care Act — called “Obamacare” — stalled again, even some allies of President Donald Trump question whether he has effectively used the bully pulpit afforded by his office and are increasingly frustrated by distractions of his own making.
Trump has spoken out repeatedly during his tenure about the shortcomings of Obamacare, which he brands a “disaster.” But he has made relatively little effort to detail for the public why Republican replacement plans — which fare dismally in public opinion polls — would improve on the former president’s signature initiative.
The lackluster sales job, combined with recent controversial tweets and public statements targeting the media, has diminished the focus on the president’s leading legislative priority at a key juncture in the Senate, allies and analysts say.
“It’s a mystery,” said Barry Bennett, a Republican operative who advised Trump’s campaign last year and remains close to the White House. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”
In recent days, Trump, who heads to Poland and Germany later this week, has seemed largely preoccupied by other things, including a Twitter feud with multiple news outlets. On Sunday, Trump sent around a video showing him body-slamming a CNN avatar, just days after calling an MSNBC host “dumb as a rock.”
A top Trump lieutenant, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, was pressed Sunday on whether the media attacks are interfering with the president’s push of the unpopular Senate bill.
“The fact of the matter is that he can do more than one thing at a time,” Price said during an exchange with host Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press that grew testy at times.
Price argued that Trump has been holding “multiple meetings within the White House itself, with physicians, with smallbusiness groups, with other folks who have been harmed by Obamacare, with patients, individual stakeholders from across this land who tell him and have told us repeatedly that the current system is collapsing.”
Trump’s public efforts to dismantle the health care law, however, contrast sharply with President Barack Obama’s efforts to build support in advance of its 2010 passage. Obama gave a joint address to Congress on health care. He fielded questions at town hall meetings around the country. And he even bantered on live television with hostile lawmakers at a Republican retreat.
Not only has Trump been unsuccessful at swinging public opinion toward the legislation, but also “he hasn’t really tried that much,” said George Edwards, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University and author of On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit.
“He hasn’t been out there consistently making a case for the legislation,” Edwards said of Trump.
It’s not hard to imagine other things Trump could be doing to try to boost support for the GOP plan among the public and, by extension, on Capitol Hill, Bennett said.
Trump could make much better use of Twitter, urging his 33 million followers to call their senators and ask them to back the GOP bill, Bennett said.
Trump could have visited several states last week, holding events that highlight the sharp rise in premiums under Obamacare, he said. And Trump could mobilize his supporters to come to Washington and rally outside the Capitol.
Trump’s seeming ambivalence about selling the GOP plan may reflect that he has always been more animated about getting rid of Obamacare than he has been about what should replace it.
To the degree he has discussed what the American health care system should look like, Trump has talked about “insurance for everybody” and coverage that would be “much less expensive and much better” — standards that the bills produced by the House and Senate don’t come close to achieving, according to analyses.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that there’s no reason Trump should follow models used by Obama or other past presidents to build public support.
“You use the model that works for you,” Spicer said, noting that Trump has advanced a healthcare bill further in the process at this point in his term than Obama. The ACA did not pass until the second year of Obama’s first term. “We’ve been more efficient,” Spicer said.
Marc Rotterman, a GOP consultant based in North Carolina, said Trump needs to be more repetitive when speaking to the public about why the bill should pass. “When you push a measure, redundancy matters,” said Rotterman, adding that he’d like to see Trump deliver an Oval Office address on the subject.
To bolster support for their initiatives in Washington, presidents often travel to friendly territory outside the Beltway to make their case. Trump has traveled outside of Washington several times lately, but those events have mostly focused on other issues.
Since the focus turned to the Senate in recent weeks, Trump has also delegated much of the lobbying to Vice President Mike Pence and senior administration officials, who have more extensive knowledge of the bill and a better sense of how to bring senators on board.
Trump also is faced with the prospect of selling a very unpopular product. A Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Senate plan projected that it would lead to 22 million fewer Americans having coverage within a decade.