Having totally botched his frontal assault on the ACA, Trump is now shifting to the RW/GOP default position of blaming Democrats for his own political incompetence. That’s a hard sell from any objective perspective, since the immediate cause of the debacle was the intransigence of the GOP’s far right (un)Freedom Caucus. Of course, anything is possible if you’re operating in a parallel universe of “alternative facts”.
If, OTOH, you prefer to base your judgments on material realities, it’s evident that the root cause of Trump’s defeat was the unprecedented, massive grass roots mobilization of resistance across the Nation. This victory is a victory for people power, something that the fake populist in the White House can ill afford to admit.
But there is more involved here than the tortured spinning of the scam artist occupying the Oval Office. When you examine his statements, you can discern the outlines of the Trump/GOP strategy on Health Care going forward. The enunciated strategy is to wait for the ACA to “implode”, at which point Trump and his posse will ride to the “rescue”.
Of course no one familiar with the RW/GOP record on the ACA can be gulled into believing that they will sit passively and await its presumed “collapse”. From the beginning, they have done whatever was within their power to sabotage the law. There’s no reason to expect they will change their spots going forward.
It’s likely that what we will see in the weeks and months ahead is continuing piecemeal Legislative attempts to undermine the Law, exacerbating existing problems and creating new ones, all presented as attempts to “fix health care”. If this strategy succeeds, it will effectively set the stage for Trump’s “John Wayne” posturing.
If this analysis is correct, we need to be preparing an aggressive counter attack now. One that makes use of the tactics of mass mobilization that have proven so effective.
It would seem the most obvious place to begin is with the GOP controlled States that have refused to implement Medicaid expansion. This refusal has never been anything more than than a cynical, politically driven effort to destroy the ACA by sacrificing the health and well being of the citizens of those states on the altar of RW ideology. Now is the time to hammer home that fact.
We need the same kind of intensive mass organizing effort in these States to push for Medicaid expansion that won the day on ACA repeal. We can’t afford to give the RW/GOP any breathing space to pursue a strategy of killing ACA by the death of a thousand cuts.
It’s time for us to launch a frontal assault of our own.