[van id=”politics/2017/07/18/trump-very-disappointed-health-bill-failure-sot.cnn”]
The collapse of the Republican bid to repeal and replace Obamacare Monday, alongside chaos brewed by the Russia scandal, has revealed a stunted presidency and a White House struggling to master the levers of power.
It also leaves President Donald Trump without a significant legislative triumph to show for his first six months in office.
“He was playing with a firetruck and trying on a cowboy hat as the bill was collapsing and he had no clue,” a top Republican told CNN’s Jeff Zeleny on Tuesday, mocking the “Made In America” week at the White House.
Trump was prepared to shoulder no blame for the failure of the bill on Tuesday, and warned he would now simply let Obamacare fail.
“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us,” Trump told reporters at the White House.
So far however, there is no sign that the Democrats would take part in any effort that would effectively repeal Obamacare. And it seems just as likely that a crisis in the health care industry, involving Americans losing health insurance, would come back to hurt the party in power, in Congress and the White House — Republicans.
Combined with Trump’s historically low approval rating for a President at this stage of his first term, and the constant, corrosive presence of the Russia drama, it adds up to a presidency testing the limits of political viability.
When a President has the lowest approval ratings of any President after six months it’s not surprising he took one of the biggest body blows in politics after six months,” said David Gergen, a senior CNN political analyst.
“We have never seen a President put forward a major legislative piece in his early days that was greeted with such derision and such fear,” Gergen told CNN’s Don Lemon on Monday night.
The question now is whether the White House and Republicans in Congress can find a way to marshall the GOP monopoly on power towards another significant agenda item — tax reform for instance.
