Trump again ready to work with Dems

WASHINGTON — With Republicans having failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, President Donald Trump confirmed Saturday that he has again asked Democrats to make a deal. They remain wary, at best.

“I called Chuck Schumer yesterday to see if the Dems want to do a great HealthCare Bill,” Trump said Saturday in a Twitter post, referring to the Senate Democratic leader. “ObamaCare is badly broken, big premiums. Who knows!”

The president’s message, posted just before he headed for his Virginia golf club, reflected his continued frustration with his own party’s failures to keep its 7-year-old promise to repeal President Barack Obama’s signature domestic achievement. He has flirted with a deal with Democrats before, only to return to Republicans’ position that the law has to be scrapped.

That’s a nonstarter with Democrats, who say the law needs improvements but is working, even as the administration is taking actions that amount to “sabotage.”

Schumer, in response, made it clear that he and Trump weren’t about to embrace on a health care plan.

“The president wanted to make another run at repeal and replace and I told the president that’s off the table,” Schumer wrote Saturday on Twitter. “If he wants to work together to improve the existing health care system, we Democrats are open to his suggestions.”

Schumer said “a good place to start” was the bipartisan effort led by two senators, Republican Lamar Alexander from Tennessee and Democrat Patty Murray of Washington, who are the chairman and senior Democrat, respectively, of the Senate’s health committee. Schumer said a deal “would stabilize the system and lower costs.”

The Alexander-Murray talks were shelved last month while Senate Republican leaders pursued their latest effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But they couldn’t attract a majority behind a bill, and legislation was never brought to a vote. Republican leaders say they will keep trying, though many Republicans say the effort is doomed and they want to focus on tax cuts.

An aide to Schumer said the timing of Trump’s call was particularly awkward,

given that the administration had just announced rules to expand the right of employers to deny women coverage for contraception on religious grounds — a move widely condemned by Democrats.

The Trump administration, the aide said, needed to stop sabotaging the law before bipartisan negotiations could begin.

The president’s call is sure to further rankle Republicans, with whom Trump has had increasingly tense relations over their failure to knock down a key pillar of Obama’s legacy.

Trump’s tweet about his call to Schumer came during another busy weekend morning on social media for him. He railed against late-night talk show hosts and NBC News for what he said was their persistently negative and inaccurate coverage of him.

But he also praised The Washington Post — a frequent target of his “fake news” rants — for an article about how Trump’s fundraising appeals to his political base

have swelled the coffers of the Republican Party.

Trump also repeated his assertion that trying to negotiate with North Korea over its nuclear and missile programs is a waste of time.

In a two-part tweet, he said: “Presidents and their administrations have been talking to North Korea for 25 years, agreements made and massive amounts of money paid ... hasn’t worked, agreements violated before the ink was dry, makings fools of U.S. negotiators. Sorry, but only one thing will work!”

And in what has become an almost weekly ritual, Trump promised residents of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi that the federal government was mustering resources to deal with the next approaching hurricane, Nate. “Please listen to your local authorities & be safe!” he wrote.

Information from The New York Times and The Associated Press were used in this story.