If this is "winning," I'd rather be losing
Can we stop pretending
that leading Republicans care about anything beyond winning and power?
To be sure, there are
some in the party who are guided by conservative “principles.” House Speaker
Paul Ryan said he’s been “dreaming” of gutting Medicaid — the program
that provides health care to the poorest Americans — since his college days.
No doubt that goal
came from some ideological notion of cutting government programs in order to
lower taxes on the wealthiest Americans, presumably because the poor are “lazy”
or “undeserving.”
Trump, for his part,
just wants to win. Remember how he promised we’d all be “tired
of winning” if he became president?
He didn’t mean we’d
“win” by having the best, most comprehensive health care system in the world.
Or the best education system in the world. (If he cared one bit about
education, he would’ve picked a secretary of education who had any
qualifications to hold that job at all. But he didn’t.)
Trump isn’t interested
in policy. Trump is interested in Trump.
At every step, his record proves he doesn’t know or care much about the particulars of any health care bill Republicans in Congress write. He cares simply about getting it passed. He just wants to declare a “win” by repealing Obamacare. He wants to make the Democrats “lose.”
If 22 million
Americans lose their health care in the process, as the Congressional Budget
Office predicts, so what? If people with cancer literally die when their health
insurance is yanked out from under them, so what?
Case in point: After
the House passed its version of the health care bill, Trump held an event in
the Rose Garden for it. Normally such a ceremony is reserved for when a president
signs a bill.
In this case, the
Senate hadn’t even considered it yet. Trump just wanted the optics of having a
win.
Remember, this is the
very same bill he later called “mean.”
Trump gets a high from
holding rallies where he speaks off the cuff to crowds that cheer and chant his
name. It makes him feel loved and important. Plus, he doesn’t have to prepare
that much, always a plus.
Yet he’s never learned
that much about policy. He just promises that everything he does will be
“tremendous” without giving any details, because he doesn’t have any. If he
gets a big cheer for something, like building a border wall, he’ll keep it in
his repertoire and ham it up even more.
No wonder he came to
believe that solving the most difficult problems on earth — North Korea, health
care, terrorism — would be easy.
There are two problems
with Trump’s win-at-all-cost ideology.
One is a practical
problem for Republicans. Congressional Republicans have enough principles (if
you count cutting programs for the poor as a principle) that it’s near
impossible to pass a health care bill that unites all of them.
The bigger problem is
for Americans. We don’t win when Republicans or Donald Trump crush the
Democrats for the sake of looking like winners. We win when our leaders
carefully analyze the nation’s problems and craft legislation that solves them.
Republicans don’t want
to lose face by keeping Obamacare, or even by reforming its shortcomings, after
promising to repeal it for years. Even though their proposals to replace it are
unpopular and awful, they’re willing to push them through out of fear their
base — or their donors — will turn on them.
Republicans in Congress
would rather millions of Americans lose health insurance than risk losing their
own jobs. Apparently that’s what “winning” looks like to them.
Americans won’t win
unless their leaders’ goal is to help the American people instead of only
helping themselves. Otherwise, Trump’s right: I am tired of
winning.
OtherWords columnist Jill Richardson
is the author of Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and
What We Can Do to Fix It. Distributed by OtherWords.org