Donald Trump flip flops yet again – and this time it could cost him

| 6:04 pm EDT April 3, 2019
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“President” Donald Trump has once again reversed himself. Last week, Trump was gung ho on the idea of overturning the Affordable Care Act. This week, he’s using another familiar strategy: completely changing his position. With Trump, this does not happen with an apology for being wrong; no, he simply comes up with some other outlandish sound bites and moves on to his next disaster.

Many experts, and even one of Trump’s former cabinet members, have clearly explained how detrimental the elimination of the ACA could be, including destroying Trump’s expressed plans of getting cheaper forms of insulin on the market, eliminating HIV, and dealing with the opioid crisis. You can read all of the details here, but you get the idea. Even as he discussed these issues, it didn’t seem to dawn on him that eliminating the ACA would make it impossible for him to carry out his own agenda.

Either Trump has been reading up on this (though most of us think he can’t), or someone is getting through to him that overturning the ACA is akin to shooting oneself in the foot. Now that Republican leaders are both privately and publicly leaving this to Trump, he must have had a “light bulb” moment that perhaps attacking the ACA isn’t the best for him politically right now.

Trump can’t, however, just move on quietly. Oh, no. That would make him appear to have been wrong, which he was. Backtracking doesn’t make him look any brighter either, especially when he comes out and boasts that the Republicans “are developing a really great HealthCare Plan with far lower premiums (cost) & deductibles than ObamaCare.”

Looking purely at numbers, elimination of the ACA would be devastating. to Politico, “an estimated 25 million people will lose coverage through private insurance and Medicaid expansion, and insurers would no longer be required to cover people with pre-existing conditions like HIV/AIDS.” In essence, Trump was rooting against himself in his quest to invalidate the ACA. He is completely clueless. Now that other Republicans are running from him as if he has the plague, he seems to get it. He negates that, however, with his ridiculous tweets about the Republicans’ “great HealthCare Plan,” which he claims they will vote on “after the Election when Republicans hold the Senate & win … back the House.” Keep dreaming, Trump.

Donald Trump and the Republicans have made very clear how much they hate Medicaid (in their minds, a bunch of lazy people who don’t want to work), Medicare (which they obviously don’t understand), and how little they care about healthcare for any of us. It’s pretty easy to do that when you have free healthcare for life, for which we pay. Instead of trying to predict the future, Trump would be better served trying to help himself and his Republican friends do right by the American public, though it is likely far too late for that. The chance of Trump being re-elected and surrounded by a fully Republican-controlled House and Senate is highly doubtful. Gallup data reveals that since 2017, the number of voters who identify as conservative has gone down, even as the number of liberals and moderates has gone up. If the Democrats can settle on the right candidate, he or she can easily take it all.