Must-Read: Ezra Klein: How Paul Ryan Played Donald Trump
Must-Read: I think Ezra has this wrong: Donald Trump may have “promised” lots of things, but why on earth would anyone think that he ever meant to keep any of those promises? Trump doesn’t know enough about policy to have policy goals—it’s reality TV, not reality.
Trump did not get played.
Trump’s voters and supporters on the other hand…
Ezra Klein: How Paul Ryan Played Donald Trump: “Donald Trump promised to be a… populist…
…fighting on behalf of the “forgotten man,” taking on the GOP establishment, draining the Washington swamp, protecting Medicaid from cuts, vowing to cover everyone with health care and make the government pay for it. He was a pragmatic businessman who was going to make Washington work for you, the little guy, not the ideologues and special interests. Instead, Trump has become a pitchman for Paul Ryan and his agenda. He’s spent the past week fighting for a health care bill he didn’t campaign on, didn’t draft, doesn’t understand, doesn’t like to talk about, and can’t defend. Rather than forcing the Republican establishment to come around to his principles, he’s come around to theirs—with disastrous results.
Democrats don’t like this bill. Independents don’t like this bill. Conservatives don’t like this bill. Moderates don’t like this bill. All the energy behind the American Health Care Act is coming from inside the GOP congressional establishment—and now from Trump himself…. Sixty days into his presidency, Trump has lashed himself to a Paul Ryan passion project that’s polling at 56-17 percent against. As political scientist Ryan Enos drolly observed, “in a hyper-partisan political climate, it’s actually an accomplishment to write legislation this unpopular.”…
The AHCA breaks Trump’s promises to his base so fulsomely, so completely, that when told by Tucker Carlson on Fox News “that counties that voted for you, middle-class and working-class counties, would do far less well under the bill,” Trump was reduced to saying, simply: “Oh, I know.” Donald Trump has become Paul Ryan with orange hair. How did it happen?…
His populism often edged into xenophobia and bigotry. But it seemed real enough…. Whatever Trumpism was, it sure as hell wasn’t Ryanism. And then it became Ryanism…. How did Ryan persuade Trump to adopt his bill? The truth is, it doesn’t appear to have been very hard. On Wednesday, the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza published a series of messages from a House Freedom Caucus source laying out the state of play on the American Health Care Act. “Don’t source to me,” the person wrote, “but R’s astonish[ed] how in over his head Trump is. He seems to neither get the politics nor the policy of this.”… It’s an interesting question why the plan Ryan concocted is such a shoddy piece of work, and why Ryan didn’t spend more time building stakeholder support or mapping out a sensible process. But it’s not particularly surprising that once Ryan had a plan, Trump was persuaded to sign off on it—the people to whom he’s outsourced these decisions share Ryan’s instincts and ideology, not Trump’s, and Trump isn’t knowledgeable enough or interested enough to question their judgments….
Ryan amped up both the flattery and the pressure. “I’ve never seen, since I’ve been in Congress—and this is the fourth president I’ve served with—I’ve never seen a president as deep and involved and engaged on passing the signature legislation as this one,” he said. And that’s how a bill that Trump didn’t campaign on and didn’t write and doesn’t understand become his “signature legislation,” and that’s how its possible failure could be recast as proof that Trump isn’t the closer he promised to be, even when he’s maximally involved in the effort….
Changing the ideology of a political party is a difficult effort. But Trump didn’t even try, and now he has burnt much of the political capital he had on Paul Ryan’s health care plan—there is no one, after this, who thinks his salesmanship unstoppable or his commitment to his own agenda unshakable, and that weakens his ability to push the Republican Party to places it doesn’t already want to go. We are 60 days into Trump’s presidency, and Trumpism is already being strangled by Ryanism. As Drudge wrote, sometimes the swamp drains you.