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Loudmouth Chickenshit Coward Trump - The Billionaire Elitist
Who Wants To See Middle Class, Poor and Vulnerable Americans
Die


NEW YORK — It was a far cry from “The buck stops here.”

President Donald Trump, dealt a stinging defeat with the
failure of the Republican health care bill in the Senate,
flipped the script from Harry Truman’s famous declaration of
presidential responsibility and declared Tuesday, “I am not
going to own it.”

He had tweeted earlier, “We were let down by all of the
Democrats and a few Republicans.”

This is the same president who thundered night after night on
the campaign trail that it would be “so easy” to repeal and
replace the Obama health care law on Day One of his
administration.

Try and tweet as he might, Trump can’t now avoid a share of the
blame for the stall-out of that repeal effort.

It’s a president’s burden to shoulder the nation’s problems
whether they are inherited or created in real time. Barack
Obama took office with the American economy facing its worst
crisis since the Great Depression. John F. Kennedy accepted
responsibility for the failure of the invasion of Cuba at the
Bay of Pigs, ordered on his own watch.

“That’s the nature of being elected president: You own the
policies, the economy and the government,” said presidential
historian Julian Zelizer, a professor at Princeton University.
“You own the positives and negatives of the job whether you
think it’s your fault or not. You live in the White House: You
can’t disassociate yourself from what happens if you don’t like
it.”

Trump took office armed with Republican control of both houses
of Congress and an ambitious agenda that would begin with the
repeal and replacement of Obamacare. Six months later, the
collapse of the GOP plan was a sharp rebuke for the president,
who was unable to cajole or threaten Republicans to stay in
line and who exerted little of his diminished political capital
to see through a promise that had been at the core of his party
since Obamacare became law seven years ago.

The president’s disjointed support for the health care plan did
little to persuade Republicans to support it, and the fact that
his approval ratings had dropped below 40 per cent didn’t help
either.

Trump never held a news conference or delivered a major speech
to sell the bill to the public. He never leveraged his
popularity among rank-and-file Republican voters by
barnstorming the districts of wavering GOP senators. And he
never spearheaded a coherent communications strategy — beyond
random tweets — to push for the plan.

“The best way to motivate members is talk to their constituents
and at no point did he try to talk to Americans about health
care reform in any sort of serious way,” said Alex Conant, a
Republican strategist who worked on Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s
2016 presidential campaign. “His attention seems to drift with
whatever is on cable news on any given moment as opposed to
what is on the Senate floor any given week.”

Sounding almost like a bystander during his brief Oval Office
remarks Tuesday, Trump six times expressed “disappointment”
that the Republican effort had failed. And he insisted the
fault rested with Democrats and suggested Obamacare should be
left to fail on its own.

“I’m not going to own it,” Trump insisted. “I can tell you that
Republicans are not going to own it.”

Democrats blasted Trump’s blame game, with Senate Minority
Leader Chuck Schumer saying his refusal to accept
responsibility demonstrated “such a lack of leadership.”

“That is such a small and petty response,” Schumer said.
“Because the president, he’s in charge. And to hurt millions of
people because he’s angry he didn’t get his way is not being a
leader.”

Despite Trump’s efforts to shift blame across the aisle, the
White House made little effort to court Democrats.

Instead of initially pursuing an infrastructure plan — which
would have likely received support from unions and blue-collar
workers, making it hard for Democrats to oppose — Trump opted
to tackle the far more polarizing issue of health care first.
He outsourced most of the work to House Speaker Paul Ryan and
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

It became a strictly Republican effort which, due to the
party’s slight advantages in the House and Senate, had little
margin for error. And it was conservatives from Trump’s own
wing of the Republican party who thwarted him.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus defied him and ignored
his Twitter threats. The two senators who withdrew their
support Monday night, effectively killing the bill, didn’t even
give the White House a heads-up before announcing their
decisions. And even though Trump allies have threatened to aid
primary challengers to a pair of on-the-fence senators — Jeff
Flake of Arizona and Dean Heller of Nevada — the Republicans
did not cave, potentially setting a worrisome precedent for the
White House as it tries to move ahead with the rest of its
stalled agenda.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump adviser, believes
that both Congress and the White House share blame after
seemingly forgetting that “opposition parties pass press
releases that get vetoed, while governing parties pass bills in
which every paragraph gets scrutinized.”

“I hope the president learns that do something really, really
big, you need to be disciplined and focused and sort out your
communications program,” said Gingrich. “So far, they are
clearly not capable of doing that.”

——

Associated Press writers Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin and Catherine
Lucey contributed from Washington.

——

EDITOR’S NOTE — Jonathan Lemire has covered the White House and
politics for The Associated Press since 2013.

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