A complete failure of Trump's leadership
Story highlights
- Julian Zelizer: Collapse of GOP effort to repeal Obamacare is an epic fail by the President
- He says Trump subverted process with his antics, threats and failure to engage on policy
Julian Zelizer is a history and public affairs professor at Princeton University and the author of "The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society." He's also the co-host of the "Politics & Polls" podcast. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.
(CNN)In
the end, nothing was more damaging to the Republican effort to repeal
Obamacare than President Donald Trump himself. His performance in
handling the first major legislative initiative of his administration
was a complete failure of leadership. Had this been an episode of "The
Apprentice," someone would be sitting around the boardroom table telling
the commander in chief, "You're fired!"
Yes,
it is difficult to dismantle any major piece of social policy. Once
Americans become used to a program, no matter how controversial, taking
away those benefits often fails. History is filled with examples, such
as Social Security, where battles to retrench the social safety net go
down in flames. But the Senate Republicans fell only one vote short of
the number needed to keep the repeal effort alive.
Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is blaming the Democrats for the defeat
that makes him look like much less than a master of the Senate.
Yet
in this case the President must bear a huge part of the burden. This
was an epic fail. With united government, a stunned Democratic Party and
a promise to repeal that had been the rallying cry for the GOP since
Congress passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Republicans faced
pretty good odds that they could get some kind of bill to the
President's desk.
But that didn't
happen. Trump subverted their efforts at each step. The endless
distractions and chaos from his Twitter account were devastating. There
was no sustained effort from the White House to build legislative
support for the bill or to sell the notion of an alternative health care
system to the public.
At
most he used his social media pulpit to castigate and cajole
congressional Republicans who were in fact trying to work around the
obstacles he created. Without any kind of message or vision, voters
didn't see any reason to rally around this plan -- and enough
Republicans on the Hill heard the message loud and clear. His biggest
speech during the final days of the legislative battles was a fiery
campaign one to the Boy Scouts.
The
sudden announcement about reversing the Obama administration's policy
allowing transgender people to serve in the military shocked and stunned
Washington right when senators were trying to vote. At the key moment
of decision-making, the new White House communications director was
doing his job in very new ways by engaging in "locker room talk" with a
New Yorker reporter about the President's top advisers.
The truth is out. Nobody is in control of this show.
The
entire process was really a stunning display of dysfunctional
policymaking. Historically whenever presidents take up major domestic
initiatives, they have their staff work out broad objectives or detailed
plans that become the basis of congressional debate.
They
don't allow the entire process to deteriorate into what we saw --
legislators voting on invisible plans and then trying to make a big
decision in a haphazard way, threatening to make massive changes to a
key part of the economy without any sense of what they were doing. The
President's decision to allow the debate to go this way reflected his
complete lack of engagement with public policy.
The
road is littered with the bodies of politicians who have been insulted
and humiliated by Trump, and they aren't at all inclined to help him.
Sen. John McCain, the Vietnam War hero whom Trump once mocked for having
been taken captive, cast a pivotal vote against the "skinny bill" that
would have given the GOP one more shot to work out a deal in conference
committee. Though McCain disappointed many people when he voted earlier
this week to allow the bill to be debated, in the end he had no interest
in enabling this chaos to continue.
Other
senators such as Alaska's Lisa Murkowski refused to be intimidated by
Trump's threats. And Trump didn't earn much credit when he publicly
threatened Sen. Dean Heller rather than courting him.
Reports
suggest that Trump's decision to lash out publicly at Attorney General
Jeff Sessions not only angered Republicans on Capitol Hill but spread
doubts they could trust him to stand by the party down the line after
they took a tough and unpopular vote. Disloyalty matters in Washington.
While
Trump likes to dismiss all the norms and processes of Washington as a
bad odor from the "swamp" that needs to be drained, in reality they are
the product of decades of politics as presidents have learned through
experience how to make things work in our complicated and disjointed
political system. A president ignores all of this received wisdom at his
own risk.
We live in an era when
everyone mocks Washington insiders, but the ultimate outsider president
could have benefited from some insider knowledge. Trump seemed to have
almost no idea how the legislative process worked. When he called the
House bill "mean," Trump didn't seem to understand the kind of political
risks legislators have to take when they vote at each step of an
uncertain process.
After the
Senate voted to let the bill reach the floor, Trump seemed to think that
victory had been achieved. "They say, if you look historically, this is
the tough vote to get." His experts didn't fill him in about how the
rest of the process works. Early Friday, he learned along with the rest
of us that the Republicans couldn't get enough votes to pass a repeal
bill.
The timing of the entire
battle was thrown off by Trump's antics and the energy the Russia
investigation has consumed -- largely because of the President's own
statements and actions, along with misleading information from members
of his team.
Democrats shouldn't
pop the champagne corks too soon. McConnell could try for another repeal
vote. Trump could move forward with his plan to subvert the Affordable
Care Act from within, by failing to enforce the individual mandate to
buy health insurance, holding back subsidies or continuing to create
doubts about the future of the program that cause major insurers to pull
out. All of this would be extraordinarily damaging to Obamacare,
preventing it from fulfilling its objectives.
Back
on the Hill, there remains the slim possibility that Senate Republicans
will move in a different path now, working around Trump and accepting
Sen. Chuck Schumer's offer to find a bipartisan fix to health care.
It
is not a surprise that more conservative voices are slowly, and
hesitantly, starting to express their opposition to Trump. His failures
as a leader are coming at a high cost. President Lyndon Johnson always
reminded his advisers that time was the most valuable commodity in
Washington since the party in power has so little of it. Legislators
quickly focus on the next midterm campaign and are less willing to take
risks for the president. The opposition party, moreover, becomes less
hesitant about taking on the president as the "momentum" from the
presidential election fades.
As the
month of July comes to a close, it should be clear to Republicans they
are losing their opportunity to enact major legislation even though they
control Congress and the White House. They must be realizing that
things are not going to get better in the Oval Office. There is no pivot
coming; this is the new normal.
In
January, many experts -- including me -- were predicting that President
Barack Obama's legacy was at serious risk. Some of the predictions have
turned out to be true, such as on measures to curb climate change. But
thus far with health care, Trump is turning out to be Obama's savior.
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