President Trump is up to his ears in the House Republican struggle to repeal and replace Obamacare. So, amid reports of dissension and disarray in the GOP effort, when Trump traveled to Tennessee to address a campaign-style rally in Nashville Wednesday night, what did he do?
He talked about how much he’d rather be cutting taxes.
“I want to get to taxes,” Trump told an enthusiastic crowd at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. “I want to cut the hell out of taxes. But before I can do that — I would have loved to put it first, to be honest — there is one more very important thing that we have to do. And we are going to repeal and replace horrible, disastrous Obamacare.”
“We’re going to reduce your taxes,” Trump said earlier. “Big league. Big. Big — and I want to start that process so quickly. Gotta get the health care done, we’ve got to start the tax reductions.”
It did not take a Trump translator to see that the president would rather be tackling tax reform — or perhaps doing a lot of other things — than working on the troubled Obamacare project.
Among the other things Trump covered in his speech before getting to Obamacare: trade, support for law enforcement, the Gorsuch Supreme Court nomination, budget cuts, an increase in defense spending, cutting regulation, reviving the coal industry, the Keystone pipeline, more trade, the Mexican border wall, border security in general, and more.
Trump spoke at length on a Hawaii federal judge’s decision, announced a short time before Trump took the stage, to stop the president’s revised travel ban before it could go in effect. The president denounced the judge. He vowed to continue his work to keep America safe. He read from the statute that the administration believe empowers him to act. He clearly spoke from the heart.
Obamacare? Not so much.
A few hours before Trump’s speech, House Speaker Paul Ryan said Trump would use the Tennessee appearance to make the case for Obamacare repeal and replacement.
“The president’s going to be talking about this tonight,” Ryan told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We’re working hand-in-glove with the White House…the president is all-in on this.”
“He just gave a speech in Michigan, and he didn’t mention it once,” Tapper told Ryan.
“That’s because he was going to do CAFE standards,” Ryan said, referring to the government’s auto mileage requirement that was on Trump’s afternoon agenda. “You’re not going to be making an announcement on CAFE standards in Michigan and step all over that story with something on health care. That’s something he’s going to do later, I think in Tennessee, if I’m not mistaken.”
Ryan was right — sort of. Trump did discuss Obamacare in Nashville. But he took his time getting to it — he brought it up nearly 28 minutes into a 38-minute speech — and he made no secret of his impatience with the complicated path House Republicans have chosen to solve the problem of dumping Barack Obama’s signature achievement without any Democratic support and without a filibuster-proof GOP majority in the Senate.
“We’re doing it a different way, a complex way, it’s fine,” Trump said, almost dismissively, of the Obamacare effort. “The end result is when you have phase one, phase two, phase three, it’s going to be great. It’s going to be great. And then — you get on to tax reductions, which I like.”
Trump spent about seven minutes, with a few diversions, talking about Obamacare. Among other things, he warmed hearts in the House leadership when he said, “The House has put forward a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, based on the principles I outlined in my joint address.”
“Hope everyone heard that,” Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong tweeted. And when Trump delivered the pitch — “The House legislation does so much for you” — Strong tweeted a screenshot of Trump’s words.
So yes, Trump did give House Republicans a show of support in the Obamacare fight. But he also sent signal after signal that he’d rather be rid of it. What that says about Trump’s willingness to fight in the long term just isn’t clear.
