In his speech, Trump encouraged police brutality and said he was “the big, big believer and admirer of the people in law enforcement, O.K.?” He said that he’s protecting the backs of law enforcement “100 percent.” Except for Sessions, Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Robert Mueller.
As two people close to Trump told The Times’s Maggie Haberman when asked why he was tormenting Sessions instead of firing him: Because he can.
.. And in his paranoid, aggrieved isolation, he’s even thinking about nixing Steve Bannon, nemesis of the Mooch, and mulling firing the one who could get him fired, Mueller, and pardoning himself for possible charges.
.. Trump learned his technique of publicly criticizing and freely firing from George Steinbrenner, one of the ruthless, towering characters he modeled himself on when he started hanging out at Yankee Stadium in the ’70s.
.. Trump had always resented Priebus for advising him to get out of the race after the Billy Bush “Access Hollywood” tape story broke — known as Priebus’s “scarlet A.H.,” according to The Washington Post — and for not understanding that Trump is not a mere Republican; he’s the head of his own “beautiful,” us-against-them movement, “the likes of which the world has never seen.”
.. As The Post reports, Trump’s delighted demeaning of Priebus included this incident: “At one point, during a meeting in the Oval Office, a fly began buzzing overhead, distracting the president. As the fly continued to circle, Trump summoned his chief of staff and tasked him with killing the insect.”
.. After torturing Reince for months, Trump happily gave him the final humiliating shove. As the tweets hit the White House cellphones, Priebus’s colleagues Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino jumped out of the Suburban they were sharing with Priebus, leaving the jobless man in a driving rain on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base, the weakest link tossed off the sled for the press wolves.
.. You’re a killer and a king or a loser, as Fred Trump liked to say. And anyone who doesn’t understand that Trump is more important than the G.O.P. or the institution of the presidency is, in his mind, a loser. Anyone who doesn’t get that the loyalty should be for him personally, rather than the country, is, to Trump, a loser.
.. With Priebus, The Post reported, the president obsessed on impotence. “The word was ‘weak’ – ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘weak,’ ‘Can’t get it done,’” an official told the paper.
.. But after all his bragging about being a great negotiator and closer, it is President Trump who can’t get it done. He couldn’t even close the deal on a pathetic, bare-bones health care bill, ineffectually bullying Lisa Murkowski, a Republican senator from Alaska, and failing to win over John McCain, who gleefully had his revenge for Trump’s mockery of him as being a loser because he was captured in war.
.. Trump can’t get it done for his pal, Putin, either. In fact, the biggest legislative accomplishment before Congress leaves for August will have been passing new sanctions on Russia because lawmakers don’t trust their own president. Talk about weak.
.. Congressional Republicans are losing their fear of Trump, making ever more snarky comments about him. North Korea is shooting off missiles and the White House is flustered. The generals are resisting Trump’s tweet edicts. The mortified leader of the Boy Scouts had to apologize for the president’s suggestive and partisan speech.
And what could be weaker than that?
The Republican Health-Care Fiasco
Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote to jettison Republicans’ latest Obamacare reform effort, handing a victory to Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, moderates whose opposition to any substantive health-care reform has become nearly intractable. But the legislation for which Republican leaders asked their conference to vote was so unpalatable, and the process so objectionable, that it is almost difficult to fault him. The Congressional Budget Office suggested that the “skinny” health legislation on which the Senate voted would raise premiums by as much as 20 percent. It assumed that since the legislation ended the fines for going without insurance, many healthy people would drop coverage, and premiums would have to pay for a sicker population. The estimate may be too high, since the CBO has repeatedly overestimated the impact of the fines. But it almost certainly had the basic story right.
Senator McCain may have been taken aback as well by the CBO’s projection that the bill would result in 16 million fewer people having insurance coverage — something Democrats nearly unanimously portrayed as “taking away” insurance from all of those people. In fact, this projection is based almost entirely on the end of the fines. The CBO estimates that once they can make a decision free of the threat of fines, 15 million people will forgo coverage.
.. We are willing to bet that McCain didn’t know any of this. A lot of health-policy experts are unaware of it too. The legislation was unveiled, after all, only a few hours before the vote. There were no hearings on it. The CBO had only provided the relevant numbers the same day, with the inferences we have made above left unstated.
Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell were asking senators to vote for a poorly understood bill that would likely raise premiums in the expectation that something better would emerge from a conference committee between the House and the Senate. But there was a chance that the House would end up just passing the skinny bill. And if the conference committee was capable of coming up with something better that could get 51 votes in the Senate, why couldn’t the Senate come up with that “something better” itself?
.. Here Senator McCain deserves criticism for naïveté. He believes that there should be bipartisan reforms to Obamacare (which is a far cry from what he had previously campaigned on).
But the Democrats have made it clear that the only “reforms” that interest them are increased taxpayer commitments to shoring up the program, including increased subsidies to the insurers. In practice, this option would amount to higher spending and, at best, a fig leaf of reform; it would become law through the votes of nearly all Democrats and a handful of Republicans.
.. Option three, the “let it burn” approach, is simply untenable.
.. Option three is likely, then, to be option two in slow motion.
.. Consideration of the alternatives should bring Republicans back to option one. Try, try again, but this time with more deliberation.
As Trump steams, Senate Republicans consider new repeal effort
Some congressional Republicans are backing a proposal by Sen. Lindsey Graham they hope can get 50 Republican votes.
The White House-health care huddle came just hours before Trump savaged Senate Republicans in a series of Saturday tweets for failing to repeal Obamacare. If the Senate doesn’t pass a bill soon, Trump warned, he may halt Obamacare payments subsidizing health plans for low-income individuals — an idea adamantly opposed by Republicans and Democrats alike.
Trump also appeared to take a personal shot at lawmakers, seemingly warning that he could revoke their own health benefits on the exchanges.
.. Senate rules don’t appear to be the problem. From the “skinny repeal” bill to a McConnell designed replacement bill to a so-called “clean” repeal bill, all GOP efforts failed to get 50 votes in the Senate this week.
.. The South Carolina senator has been talking to Meadows about the bill as a possible way forward that both chambers could accept. Several GOP governors have signaled interest to Graham for the bill as a way to keep funding levels steady and give states more control.
.. Republican senators are angry at Trump for calling Murkowski this week to rethink her opposition to the GOP’s effort, several Republican sources said.
The moderate Alaska senator told E&E News that the conversation on Tuesday with Trump was “not a very pleasant call.” Several Republicans said privately Trump’s heavy hand derailed any chance of getting Murkowski to support the “skinny” bill,
House GOP Releases Plan to Repeal, Replace Obamacare
Proposed legislation would dismantle much of Affordable Care Act, create refundable tax credit tied to age and income
Earlier versions included provisions opposed by both conservative and centrist Republicans, whose support for the now-altered bill will be crucial.House Republican leaders hope the package will be passed by Congress by mid-April... Under the House GOP proposal released Monday, the refundable tax credits would be tied to age, with people under 30 eligible for a credit of $2,000 per year, increasing steadily to $4,000 for those over 60. The size of a tax credit would grow with the size of a family, but would be capped at $14,000.
.. The GOP plan aims to appease their concerns by leaving the expansion untouched through the end of 2019. After that, funding would begin to be reduced in an attempt to make up for the revenue lost by repealing the taxes contained in the existing health law.
.. Republican Sens. Rob Portman of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Cory Gardner of Colorado and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia sent a letter Monday to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) expressing concerns over the House’s approach to overhauling the Medicaid program in an earlier draft of the bill.
.. The proposal would also end a special executive compensation limit that the 2010 law applied to health insurers. That law prevented companies from deducting more than $500,000 in pay to executives. Other companies face a $1 million limit, but that cap doesn’t apply to performance-based compensation.