Health care bill flop shows Trump’s competence gap

One of President Donald Trump’s rare strengths has been his ability to project competence. The Dow Jones stock index is up an astonishing 2,200 points since his election in part because investors believed Trump could deliver tax reform and infrastructure spending. Think again! The Trump administration is increasingly showing itself to be breathtakingly incompetent, and that’s the real lesson of the collapse of the GOP health care bill. The administration proved unable to organize its way out of a paper bag: After seven years of Republicans publicly loathing Obamacare, their repeal-replace bill failed after 18 days.

Politics sometimes rewards braggarts, and Trump is a world-class boaster. He promised a health care plan that would be “unbelievable,” “beautiful,” “less expensive and much better,” “insurance for everybody.” But he’s abysmal at delivering.

It’s sometimes said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Trump campaigns in braggadocio and governs in bombast.

Failure and weakness also build on themselves, and the health care debacle will make it more difficult for Trump to get his way with Congress on other issues.

One of the underlying problems is Trump’s penchant for personnel choices that are bafflingly bad or ethically challenged or both.

Consider Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism adviser to the president. Gorka, who is of Hungarian origin, founded an extremist right-wing party in Hungary in 2007, and The Forward has published articles claiming that Gorka had ties to the anti-Semitic Hungarian right and is a sworn member of a Nazi-allied group in Hungary called Vitezi Rend. Karl Pfeifer, an Austrian journalist who has long specialized in Hungarian affairs, told me that Gorka unquestionably had worked with racists and anti-Semites in Hungary.

But Gorka told The Tablet website that he had never been a member of Vitezi Rend and used the v initial only to honor his father.

In fairness, Trump has also appointed plenty of solid people: Jim Mattis, Elaine Chao, H.R. McMaster, Dina Powell, Gary Cohn, Steven Mnuchin and more.

Yet Trump’s record of appointments overall suggests a lack of interest in expertise. I’m not sure that this is “the worst Cabinet in American history,” as a Washington Post opinion writer put it, but it might be a contender.

Trump named his bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, to be ambassador to Israel. He picked Omarosa Manigault, who starred with him on “The Apprentice” and has a record of inflating her résumé, to be assistant to the president.

Some see the failure of the GOP health care bill through a larger prism: The measure collapsed not just because it was a dreadful bill (a tax cut for the wealthy financed by dropping health coverage for the needy). It also failed as a prime example of the Trump administration’s competence gap.

Democrats may feel reassured, because ineptitude may impede some of Trump’s worst plans. But even if Trump is unable to build, he may be able to destroy: I fear his health care “plan” now is to suffocate Obamacare by failing to enforce the insurance mandate, and then claim its spasms are inevitable.

What we’re seeing more clearly now is that Trump has crafted an administration in his own image: vain, narcissistic and dangerous.