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On March 13th, the Breitbart News site that was headed and controlled by Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager and the the current White House’s Chief Strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, indirectly declared all-out war against House Republicans, in a scathing news-report which opened:
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Exclusive — Audio Emerges of When Paul Ryan Abandoned Donald Trump: ‘I Am Not Going to Defend Donald Trump—Not Now, Not in the Future’
by MATTHEW BOYLE, 13 Mar 2017, Washington, D.C. 7,241 comments
On a never-before-released private October conference call with House Republican members, House Speaker Paul Ryan told his members in the U.S. House of Representatives he was abandoning then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump forever and would never defend him ever again.
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In the Oct. 10, 2016 call, from right after the Access Hollywood tape of Trump was leaked in the weeks leading up to the election, Ryan does not specify that he will never defend Trump on just the Access Hollywood tape—he says clearly he is done with Trump altogether.
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“I am not going to defend Donald Trump—not now, not in the future,” Ryan says in the audio, obtained by Breitbart News and published here for the first time ever.
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Now, Ryan—still the Speaker—has pushed now President Donald Trump to believe his healthcare legislation the American Health Care Act would repeal and replace Obamacare when it does not repeal Obamacare. Ryan has also, according to Trump ally Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), misled President Trump into believing that Ryan’s bill can pass Congress. Paul and others believe the bill is dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate since a number of GOP senators have come out against it, and there are serious questions about whether it can pass the House. This is the first major initiative that Trump has worked on with Ryan—and the fact it is going so poorly calls into question whether Speaker Ryan, the GOP’s failed 2012 vice presidential nominee who barely supported Trump at all in 2016, really understands how Trump won and how to win in general.
Paul Ryan, as is well known, is a hero to House Republicans, who had to plead with him to become, first their leader, and then Speaker of the House, the position third-in-succession to the U.S. Presidency. It is therefore not possible to attack him without attacking House Republicans. The decision to publish this blockbuster news report is therefore either a strategic move by U.S. President Donald Trump, or else a proof that, somehow, the other top people at Breitbart News are, on their own and entirely independently of Bannon and of Trump, ditching House Republicans. It’s one or the other; it can’t be both.
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Clearly, Donald Trump, who as a Presidential candidate famously spoke out of both the conservative (such as deporting all illegal immigrants) and the progressive (such as restoring FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act), sides of his mouth, has in his actual policies as the U.S. President, led or tried to lead only out of his mouth’s right side, and some would even say that he’s a far-right President. He hasn’t even thrown a bone to America’s progressives. His whole approach in assembling his Cabinet and his entire Administration has been a joy to conservatives and a hell for progressives. He has been doing everything for House Republicans, to make them his legislative machine to draft all new bills, which he hopes to sign into law, and his full intention has been to rule as a very Republican President.
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The failure of the President’s first major legislative initiative, the Republican healthcare bill, has shown his judgment on that to have been terribly wrong, irrespective of how good or bad the proposed legislation actually is, but solely for its ridiculousness — that it cannot be passed even by a strongly Republican House. It is a farce, and everyone either knows this already or soon will.
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Also clearly, now, Donald Trump’s progressive campaign promises were intended only to gain enough votes from supporters of Bernie Sanders so as to be able to win in the general election against Hillary Clinton — to attract enough “Bernie” voters away from Clinton and toward Trump, so as to win.
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Trump, in other words, is a thoroughly transactional man, who was intending to rule as a far more traditionally Republican President than at least a significant number of progressives were hoping or perhaps even expecting.
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That game-plan is over. It has already collapsed. Maybe his Presidency has collapsed. But not necessarily. Here is why:
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Because of the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that the likely effect that the Trump-endorsed Obamacare-replacement bill would have on the numbers of Americans lacking health insurance would be 14 million fewer with insurance by 2018, and 24 million fewer by 2026, there is no chance that the bill — which already was in deep trouble — will ever become law. Trump would lose his Presidency if he were to succeed in eliminating Obamacare without replacing it — that simply won’t happen. But the likelihood of a second try at replacing it becoming passed by Congress is generally considered to be zero. However, that zero-assumption is itself based upon a questionable more-basic assumption: that if Trump is to have a successful Presidency, then he’ll need the support of almost all Republicans in Congress — that he’ll either succeed as a conservative, or else become a failed President. This assumption will be questioned here:
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As was previously noted here but just in passing, Trump during his campaign for the Presidency, famously spoke out of both the conservative side of his mouth, and the progressive side of his mouth; he contradicted himself galore; but, thus far in his Presidency, including the assembling of his Administration, he has been bringing into his Administration only people who are viewed as being far-right — not only on immigration, but on privatizing public education, the environment, labor, and, with this healthcare bill, also now healthcare, plus on most of the other Cabinet Departments and agencies. This far-right character of his Administration has been due to the general agreement that if he won’t get the backing from congressional Republicans, he’ll get very little (or at least little that’s significant) achieved, during his Presidency. That’s the false assumption.
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I have previously indicated ten major areas of important public policy in which Trump agreed more with the views of the progressive Bernie Sanders than he did with the views of the liberal Hillary Clinton or of the outright conservatives, the Republicans in Congress. Trump would not have won the election against Clinton if he had not won a certain number of Sanders-supporters, people who were determined that America is too corrupt, and that, as Trump put it, the next President must “drain the swamp” in Washington — not continue the corruption. Trump railed against corruption; Sanders railed against corruption; Hillary Clinton did not. Trump also advocated for the re-instatement of FDR’s Glass-Steagall Act, which, until Bill Clinton and Lawrence Summers and Robert Rubin and the Republicans in Congress got together to abolish it in 1999, had prohibited banks and insurance companies from gambling on Wall Street with the federally insured money in depositors’ checking accounts and savings accounts. (In fact, at the March 9th White House press briefing, Sean Spicer was asked “Senator Sanders campaigned on this as well, noted that it was in the Republican platform in Cleveland, and said in December he’d be happy to work with the Trump administration on restoring Glass-Steagall. Is there any plans for the President to meet with Senator Sanders? And is repeal of Glass-Steagall on his agenda [to reverse]?” And Spicer dodged the question and was then interrupted by that reporter’s “Q Are you still committed to restoring Glass-Steagall?” at which Spicer said simply “Yes,” and went promptly to the next questioner, and none of the other questioners brought up the matter in order to get a further comment from Spicer about this stunning “Yes.”)
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Another good example is Trump’s campaign statements regarding health care. Trump had told Scott Pelley of CBS “60 Minutes” on September 27th, while campaigning against Hillary Clinton, that he favors taxpayer-paid healthcare for Americans who cannot afford to pay for the basic healthcare they need — and this idea, of basic healthcare as a right instead of as a privilege, was something that Ms. Clinton had always said was a “one size fits all” approach that reduces consumer-choices and is inappropriate for the United States. Trump, to the contrary, promised it; he told Pelley:
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This, of course, contradicts what he actually was trying to get Congress to pass into law. Trump practically owned the Ryan bill: here is what he actually said about the bill on March 7th:
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“I’m proud to support the replacement plan, released by the House of Representatives and encouraged by members of both parties. I think really that we’re going to have something that’s going to be much more understood and much more popular than people can even imagine. It follows the guidelines I laid out in my congressional address — a plan that will lower costs, expand choices, increase competition, and ensure healthcare access for all Americans.” It was and is none of those things.
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He’s now forced to abandon it, because it’s dead-in-the-water. But what would happen if the bill that he describes to the nation as what he actually wants to see pass in Congress turns out to be instead along the lines of the “un-Republican” type that he described there to the nation, on September 27th? The possibility of a successful progressive Trump Presidency emerges — if he’s willing to take it.
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It would be the correct policy regarding America’s health care. Doing that — adhering to what he had promised to the nation on the September 27th CBS “60 Minutes” — would actually cost far less than what the U.S. (including the government, the insurers, and the patients) now spends on healthcare. Hillary Clinton was wrong about health care; Trump was correct on that. Recent OECD data on healthcare costs show that the U.S., which is the only OECD country that handles healthcare as a privilege instead of as a right, spends by far the world’s highest percentage of GDP on healthcare, 16.9 percent; and also show that the average U.S. life expectancy is 78.7 years; by contrast, Canada spends 10.2 percent, and their life expectancy is 81.0 years. The OECD average expenditure is 9.3 percent , and life expectancy is 80.1 years. So: the U.S. spends almost twice as high a percentage of GDP as every other OECD nation, and yet gets markedly inferior results. This makes the U.S. far less economically competitive than it otherwise would be; but, the healthcare industries finance conservative politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and all Republicans; so, those politicians don’t like single-payer — it would take the excess profits out of exploiting the sick, and those excess profits help to fund their political campaigns and get them elected.
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The American people’s financial losses produce exceptional financial gains for the investors in healthcare-related stocks, and also inflate the pay for executives in those firms. This helps to fund lots of what conservatives such as Antonin Scalia lovingly call “free speech” — campaign commercials.
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Here are the latest available data, and they show that, still today, the U.S. is somewhat worse than average, for quality of care, and astronomically higher than any nation on both per-capita healthcare costs, and the percentage of GDP that goes to healthcare costs. For examples: across 45 countries tabulated by the OECD, the U.S. healthcare-expenditure per capita was $8,713 and 16.4% of GDP, whereas the average OECD country paid $3,453 and 8.9% of GDP. France paid $4,124 and 10.9% of GDP, and Japan paid $3,713 and 10.2% of GDP. The U.S. also was tied with Brazil, Chile, and South Africa, for having the highest percentage of healthcare-costs that’s paid privately rather than by the government.
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In any case, with our existing healthcare-for-profit, instead of healthcare-as-a-right, system, the U.S. ends up paying lots more than our competing nations, yet getting inferior results. (Apparently, postponing care until one is being rushed into an emergency-room is both atrociously poor care, and extremely expensive care. But it’s the most profitable for the sickness-industries — so, President Trump, relying upon congressional Republicans for his support, wants it to continue. Republicans care lots more about corporate stockholders than they do about the public’s welfare; and, unlike Democrats, they don’t pretend not to. That’s the difference between the two Parties.)
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Consequently: What Trump was promising on healthcare, when he spoke to Scott Pelley, was the only way to reduce America’s healthcare costs. It would also — if the experience of the other OECD countries, all of which treat basic healthcare as a right not a privilege, is to teach us anything — considerably increase the quality of our healthcare, yet cost far less.
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But Trump (like his predecessors, including Obama, Bush, and both Clintons) has thus far been more concerned about the profits to healthcare-providers than about the healthcare of the American people, and about the competitiveness of the American economy.
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So: Trump does have an opportunity, after all, to salvage his rapidly sinking Presidency, by firing and replacing the most conservative people whom he has brought into his Administration, and by using the bully pulpit of the White House to document to the American people the necessity to abandon the primary orientation of our government being to raise the stock and bond markets, and to replace that top aim by the primary orientation being instead to serve the American public, who have been abandoned by both political Parties except in campaign and political rhetoric.
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If Trump were to do this, then either congressional Democrats would join with him and they together would take back the government on behalf of the public whom it is supposed to be serving, or else the Democratic Party will collapse as a bleeding scandal.
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And it’s not just on health care and Glass-Steagall that Trump made progressive promises to the nation during his campaign — there are ten major public-policy areas on which he stated positions that were more progressive than the position that Hillary Clinton was campaigning on and had exhibited in her actual record as a U.S. public official. Those are ten major public-policy opportunities for him to pass legislation in Congress with potentially more votes from Democrats than from Republicans. It would establish him as no longer being the most divisive U.S. President in history but instead, suddenly, as perhaps the first U.S. President who truly rules above political Party — a really transformational figure, in our increasingly divisive era.
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What would he have going for him, to use on the bully pulpit, if he were to take this path? Truth. Science. Repudiation of specific lies — and proof that they are false. Total honesty. Massive scientific studies backing up each and every policy-proposal. Scientists would be his bulwark, no longer his victims.
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It would be a 180-degree turnaround, on many of his policy-issues, as compared to the positions that almost all of his Presidential appointees thus far have been supporting. It would also entail a substantial replacement of personnel whom he has appointed up till now.
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It’s do or die for his Presidency.
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Trump needs to decide whether to continue governing from only the right side of his mouth, or whether to switch to governing from its left side, which he promptly abandoned after winning the Presidency on November 8th.
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And, if he will govern from the left instead of from the right, then he’ll no longer be dependent upon bigots in order to be able to win the legislative fights that will come.
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He has to choose between being another FDR, a transformatively great President, or else a failed President. If he makes the choice to turn around and do the right thing, to turn left in the good sense of “left,” then at least he’ll have a chance to be a great one; and, if he then fails in that fight, and Democrats in Congress refuse to be his bulwark to build his legislation upon, then Democrats will go down, and Republicans who fail to back Trump on the effort also will, and he will win re-election as a real leader, instead of lose the Presidency because he’s just another corrupt pol like all the other Presidents we’ve had recently were.
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If “making America great again” meant anything at all, it meant returning to the legacy of FDR. But, thus far in Trump’s Presidency, it has instead been just an empty campaign-slogan, and only Trump himself can make it become more than that — if he even wants to.
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Now is the time when he’ll be making his choice, between possible greatness, and certain abject failure.
About the author
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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With the highest number of billionaires and generals of any previous president in his cabinet, he has already made his choice. Some of my friends (progressives)who voted for him, were wishing for dreams…..Trump the casino operator who profits off of the losses of the suckers who gamble in his casinos suddenly has a change of heart and becomes public spirited? Not a chance.