Paul Krugman Warns GOP Trump Won’t Be Taking the Blame if AHCA Goes Down in Flames

It is an established fact that Donald Trump will never accept responsibility for anything. His first reaction is to delegitimize the source and when that fails, to throw any handy supporter under the bus. We have seen it happen time and again.

Paul Krugman has issued a warning to Congressional Republicans that their turn is coming up next, as their health care reform bill, the American Health Care Act, or AHCA, looks to be selected for early extinction:

That’s right. Krugman’s warning will likely go unheeded, but Trump will brush Paul Ryan and company off his shoulder like so much unwanted lint should this thing go south.

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And Krugman tried to put their danger in terms they could understand, by appealing to the example of Trump U:

Oh how that would hurt if R’s weren’t so obsessed with finally obtaining the holy grail of their party, the “conservative agenda.” Terrifyingly, as Krugman says, throughout these first weeks of the Trump Experiment the numbers of Republicans who trust Trump over the media has climbed from 78 to 86 percent.

You can lead a horse to water, and if he’s a Republican, you can make him drink it too. And gulp it down they do. What’s remarkable is that this whole imbroglio has revealed a GOP that, as The Plum Line‘s Greg Sargent points out, displays a shocking level of “policy illiteracy.”

They are doing it to themselves. The GOP health care plan is a profound failure, a catastrophe of epic proportions.

They have had eight years to think about replacing Obamacare and this is what they came up with: what appears to be a desultory weekend of meandering thought at Paul Ryan’s desk.

All the more shocking for, as Krugman points out,

Well, yes. Remember, Paul Ryan excels at making people think talking about something and attaching to it fancy slogans is the same thing as actually doing something, just as Donald Trump has made an art form of evading responsibility for his actions.

If this is the best the GOP can do when victory is within grasp, they deserve to lose, and they deserve to be crushed under the wheels of both history and Trump’s bus.

Which will be more painful, only they can tell us.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.