Welcome to Trump’s Fantasyland

CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

In case you were barred by the pay wall, some 'highlights':

If our republic had a responsible Congress, its leaders would accept their duty to demand that a president who shakes his country and the world with such an outlandish allegation either put up proof or apologize.

Instead, Republican leaders think it is time for business as usual, which in their case means figuring out how to deprive low-income people of health insurance while cutting taxes on the rich and increasing the deficit.

This is what their replacement of Obamacare would do. Democrats have quickly labeled the bill “Trumpcare,” and why not? Trump described it as “wonderful.” What’s interesting about his embrace is that the proposal fails (forgive me) bigly in living up to the joyous health-care future Trump envisioned.

“Everybody’s got to be covered,” the magician of Mar-a-Lago said on “60 Minutes” in September 2015. “I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” Trump’s campaign pledges were so sweeping that Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.), his then-rival for the Republican presidential nomination, cast Trump as a fan of a single-payer system.

No one should act as if Trump didn’t warn us about his negotiable relationship with the truth. He laid it out in his 1987 bestseller, “The Art of the Deal.” Trump wrote: “I play to people’s fantasies. . . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” He spoke of “truthful hyperbole” — an oxymoron for the ages — which he defined as “an innocent form of exaggeration.”

You know the Republicans are in trouble because Ryan said that all the mysteries would be resolved if citizens would only “read the bill.” So I did, and my experience confirmed that Ryan’s invitation was a typical example of obfuscatory Beltway nonsense. The speaker knows that gems such as language calling for amending “subsection (d)(1), by striking ‘to which’ and inserting ‘to which, subject to section 1903A(a),’” are incomprehensible to anyone but lawyers, policy experts and crack legislative drafters. Reading this thing doesn’t make it better.