After declaring over and over again throughout the 2016 campaign how “easy” it would be to fix Obamacare, Donald Trump on Tuesday admitted defeat after it became clear Trumpcare wouldn’t make it through the Senate. The GOP then temporarily scrapped plans for a “repeal and replace” plan in favor of a simple repeal. The president spoke to the media during a lunch for U.S. service members with Vice President Mike Pence by his side, and he did not sound very optimistic.
“I think we’re probably in that position where we’ll just let Obamacare fail. We’re not gonna own it. I’m not gonna own it,” Trump told reporters. “We’ll let Obamacare fail and then Democrats are going to come to us.”
The bill was not just doomed to fail because of Democrats, of course, as several Senate Republicans also stood against it. When asked whether or not he felt the holdouts were “disloyal” to the party, Trump offered a rather eyebrow-raising response, in which he insinuated the bill would have passed had not it been for those pesky Dems getting a say in the matter:
“Well they were not disloyal. They had their own reasons. I was very surprised when the two folks came out last night because we thought they were in fairly good shape, but they did, and everybody has their own reason. But if you really think about it, you look at it, and we have 52 people, we had no Democrats on board, which is really, you know, something that should be said. We should have had Democrats voting. This is a great plan for a lot of people. We had no Democrats on board.
“We had 52 people, we had four nos, and we might have had another one in there, but essentially the vote would have been pretty close to, if you look at it, 48 to four. That’s a pretty impressive vote by any standard. And yet, you have a vote of 48 to four or something like that and you need more, it’s pretty tough. So the way I look at it is in ’18, we’re gonna have to get some more people elected. We have to go out and we have to get more people elected that are Republican, and we probably have to pull in those people, those few people who voted against it.”
Trump then went on to blast Democrats as obstructionists who have “no ideas” and “no thought process,” adding: “And by the way, Obamacare isn’t failing. It’s failed, it’s gone.” Unsurprisingly, Twitter users dug up yet another amazing tweet from Trump’s past that has now come back to haunt him. If only 2013 Donald Trump could have seen this coming!
Leadership: Whatever happens, you're responsible. If it doesn't happen, you're responsible.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 8, 2013