Source: Jacob Kupferman / Getty
At this point, Donald Trump is just doing reruns in order to keep his MAGA cult gassed up.
In a recent post to his absurdly misnamed Truth Social platform, Trump resorted to retro right-wing propaganda by promising to repeal Obamacare if he’s reelected as president in 2024.
OBAMACARE!!!
Seriously, why doesn’t Trump just go ahead and resurrect the “birther” non-argument?
It’s bad enough that the commander-in-criminal-indictments is still dog-whistling Barack Obama’s middle name during campaign speeches and erroneously claiming he’s still pulling the strings in the White House. Now, Trump is reaching further than his toupee in the wind to bring back an issue even Republicans have scarcely talked about within the last decade.
Besides the fact that Trump has allowed his predecessor to build an entire shrine to himself inside Trump’s head tax-free, the MAGA messiah is resorting to his usual tactic of just saying things without a modicum of proof. Trump, who notably failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act while he was in office, didn’t offer a single factual citation to go along with his claim that the ACA “is out of control” or that “it’s not good healthcare. In fact, most Americans don’t appear to agree.
From the Associated Press:
About 6 in 10 Americans say they have a favorable opinion of the health reform bill signed into law in 2010, known commonly as the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare, according to a KFF poll conducted in May 2023.
A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found 37% of Americans trust Democrats to do a better job than Republicans on handling health care, versus about 1 in 5 — 18% — who trust Republicans over Democrats on this issue. About one-third (34%) trust neither party.
According to AP, Trump’s throwback Obamacare attack was a response to a Wall Street Journal op-ed he shared highlighting concerns raised by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Mike Braun (R-Ind.) that large insurance companies are using their pharmacies “to evade federal requirements that limit the percentage of premium dollars spent on profits and administration, known as the Medical Loss Ratio (MLR), resulting in sky-high prescription drug costs and excessive corporate profits.”
Now, the letter cited by WSJ, which Warren and Braun sent to Christi Grimm, inspector general at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, doesn’t mention the ACA even once, but WSJ still took the liberty of conflating the issues and reimagining the senators’ concerns as them taking issue with Obamacare.
Meanwhile, on X, the general consensus appears to be that Trump is trying to resurrect a dead issue, that he’s trying to strip away healthcare from millions of Americans and that Republicans have tried and failed to repeal and replace Obamacare for years, largely because they have offered no practical alternative to a “problem” most Americans don’t believe needs fixing.
It’s almost as if, outside of the MAGA world, Trump’s entire campaign is designed to prompt the question: Who asked for this?
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