President Trump thought he could use his skills as a salesman to bridge a divide in the Republican Party over the bill to repeal and replace Obamacare. There was a problem, though. As the FRONTLINE documentary “Trump’s Takeover” reports, the president didn’t seem to understand or care about the details of the bill he was selling.
“The president was not particularly engaged in the policy details. That was pretty apparent,” Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Penn.) tells FRONTLINE. “The president seemed to defer to Congress, largely, and basically, ‘Whatever you guys pass, I’ll sign.’”
This scene is an excerpt from the new documentary, “Trump’s Takeover,” which goes inside President Trump’s high-stakes battle for control of the Republican Party.
It examines how the president, who vowed to defeat the Washington establishment, has worked to remake the party in his own image — counter-punching when criticized, and publicly attacking Republicans who defy him.
From Trump’s attacks on party leaders on Twitter after the repeal-and-replace bill died, to a split over what many in the party said was the president’s inadequate response to deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, to when Congress ultimately delivered a major legislative victory for Trump with the passage of tax reform, the documentary traces the president’s takeover of the party, from the perspective of Republican lawmakers.
“Trump’s Takeover” premieres Tues., April 10 at 10/9c on PBS & online: https://to.pbs.org/2GNBtMc
FRONTLINE is streaming more than 200 documentaries online, for free, here: http://to.pbs.org/hxRvQP
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Major funding for FRONTLINE is provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation, the Park Foundation, The John and Helen Glessner Family Trust, and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation.
Trump’s economic record is one big con
President Trump came into office promising some fabulous yet unspecified health-care plan to replace the Affordable Care Act. No plan existed; every plan Republicans came up with managed to reduce the number of insured. Trump promised never to cut entitlements; his fiscal 2020 budget proposal would have done just that.
Trump said he’d bring back manufacturing. In fact, it slowed and now has slumped. (“Manufacturing has slowed amid global uncertainty,” NPR reported earlier this month. “That’s one of the reasons the Federal Reserve gave for cutting interest rates this week.”)
Trump said he’d
- get tough on drug companies. He hasn’t. He said his
- tax cut would be aimed at the middle class,
- deliver $4,000 a year to the average American family and
- permanently boost business investment, pushing growth above 3 percent. Nope, nope and nope.
The worst thing Barr did this week had nothing to do with the Mueller report
The worst thing that Attorney General William P. Barr did this week arguably had nothing to do with possible contempt of Congress or the Mueller report.
It had to do with health care.
On Wednesday, amid the circus over alleged special counsel snittiness, the department that Barr oversees formally asked a federal appeals court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing access to health care for tens of millions of Americans.
If the Trump administration prevails, everything in the law would be wiped out. And I do mean everything: the protections for people with preexisting conditions, Medicaid expansion, income-based individual-market subsidies, provisions allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, requirements that insurance cover minimum essential benefits such as prescriptions and preventive care, and so on.
The administration’s rationale was laid out in a policy brief supporting a lawsuit challenging Obamacare by 20 red states. Their logic: When Congress, as part of President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, set the penalty for not carrying health insurance to zero, that effectively made it no longer really a “tax,” and therefore made it unconstitutional. Somehow, that rendered the rest of the law unconstitutional, as well — including lots of provisions having nothing to do with the mandate.
This reasoning has been rejected even by conservative legal scholarsotherwise opposed to the law. But legal merits (and demerits) aside — which are likely to be ultimately adjudicated by the Supreme Court — it’s also not clear what political upside Republicans could possibly see in mounting yet another overt attack on Obamacare.
The GOP’s November congressional losses were largely motivated by voter rage over the party’s attacks on Obamacare, after all. Trump has, of course, more recently proclaimed the GOP the “party of health care,” and he and other party leaders continue repeating the obvious fiction that they’re cooking up “something terrific” to replace the ACA.
About half of the U.S. population has employer-based coverage, including 60 percent of nonelderly adults. While most say they are generally satisfied with these health plans, many nonetheless struggle with the financial burden they impose — particularly the high-deductible plans that cover 4 in 10 people with employer-sponsored insurance.
Deductibles in employer-sponsored insurance have been rising since long before the ACA. They have nearly quadrupled over the past 12 years and now average $1,350 for a single-person plan. But separate survey data show that only half of nonelderly, one-person households report having at least $2,000 in savings available.
Trump surprises Republicans — and pleases Democrats — with push to revive health-care battle
A surprise move by the Trump administration aimed at striking down the Affordable Care Act thrust the partisan battle over health care into the middle of the 2020 campaign on Tuesday, handing Democrats a potential political gift on an issue that damaged Republicans badly in last year’s midterm elections.
In a new court filing, the Justice Department argued that the ACA, also known as Obamacare, should be thrown out in its entirety, including provisions protecting millions of Americans with preexisting health conditions and allowing young adults to stay on their parents’ health-care plans.
President Trump praised the move during a lunch with Senate Republicans, and suggested the GOP should embrace a new congressional battle over health-care policy ahead of the 2020 elections.
“Let me tell you exactly what my message is: The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care,” he told reporters before the lunch. “You watch.”
.. Trump spent much of his time at the Senate lunch talking about health care, according to several senators present.
“If there’s a message to be learned from 2018 on policy, it’s health care,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters after the lunch Tuesday. “Let’s become the party of health care.”
“He thinks that that’s the one area where we’ve fallen short and he wants to see us address it,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.). “He made that very clear.”
“If you’re a Republican thinking about 2020 right now, you want to be on offense on health care, not defense,” she said. “And the only way to do that is to make the focus on what Democrats want to do — on Medicare-for-all — rather than making it on what the president and the White House are suggesting.”
.. A federal judge in Texas ruled in December that the law’s individual mandate “can no longer be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s tax power” and further found that the remaining portions of the law are void. He based his judgment on changes to the nation’s tax laws made by congressional Republicans in 2017.
.. “It is highly unusual for the Department of Justice not to defend duly enacted laws, which the Affordable Care Act certainly was,” Collins said. “This decision to even go more broadly in failing to defend the law is very disappointing.”
.. “I think Obamacare should be gone,” he said. “We’ve got to cover people with preexisting conditions apart from Obamacare, which is what I talked about a lot.”
.. There would be ripple effects throughout the health-care industry and insurance landscape as well. Those with workplace plans could be affected, as employers would be allowed to scale back certain medical benefits, and people with preexisting conditions buying coverage on their own would no longer be guaranteed access to coverage at no extra cost.