What's Less Popular Than Donald Trump?

- Jonathan Chait

For all the extensive legal jeopardy Donald Trump already faces in his very young presidency, it is striking that the greatest source of political jeopardy for both him and his party is not his possible Nixon-esque crimes but his Paul Ryan–esque health-care plan. Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey, while unpopular, is far less so than the health-care bill whose House passage he celebrated in the Rose Garden on May 4. One poll found 39 percent support for the Comey firing, which is twice the level of support for the House Speaker’s evisceration of the Affordable Care Act. Democrats running in special elections in Montana and Georgia have emphasized the House Speaker’s legislative handiwork over the president’s high crimes and misdemeanors.

The Republican Party that Trump hijacked last year has treated its freak-show president as the single weak point in its unified control of government. Its leadership has concluded, accordingly, that its best strategy is to ignore Trump’s antics and carry out its agenda. “If we don’t keep our promises, then we’re going to have a problem” in the midterm elections, Ryan said recently. What the party has not come to grips with is the reality that the promises themselves are a problem.

Trump made extravagant campaign pledges — that he would not cut Medicaid, that he would take care of every American’s health-insurance needs, that it would be “so easy” — and saddled his congressional party with the task of carrying many of them out. But it was not Trump who chose the design of the American Health Care Act. That was Ryan. The thrust of Ryan’s plan is to finance a tax cut benefiting mostly a very small number of wealthy investors by reducing or eliminating health-insurance subsidies for millions of people. There was never a political universe in which a plan like this was going to fly.