Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd in her New York Times column this morning, takes down Donald Trump for his role in the recently passed House-healthcare bill.  Here is an excerpt:

“In “The Art of the Deal,” Trump said that playing to people’s fantasies and promising the greatest product was “an innocent form of exaggeration.”  But it’s one thing when you do that for condos and cologne and mattresses and steaks. It’s another for life-or-death health care policy.

Trump has twice pushed to pass disgraceful health care bills without even trying to grasp what’s in them — or more important, what’s not in them. He couldn’t care less that the dog’s breakfast served up by the House on Thursday wounds the struggling Americans he had promised to lift up.

It is “something terrific,” as he vowed, but only for the superrich who are getting a Marie Antoinette wealth transfer at the expense of health care for the poor.

The president feted his fake-news “win” in the Rose Garden, sprinkling flimflam dust to deflect from his ludicrous legislation. Paul Ryan slobbered over Trump’s leadership even as the Senate made plans to shred the House bill and start over.

“Hey, I’m president,” Trump told his sycophants, or in this case, sickophants. “Can you believe it, right?”

No, I can’t.

In a moment of clueless cynicism, hours after the ego festival in the Rose Garden, Trump sat in a tuxedo with the Australian prime minister on the Intrepid and said Australians have better health care than Americans — harking back to his old statements in support of universal health care.

Presidents have to be good salesmen. Barack Obama faltered because he hated selling and simply lectured. He even outsourced the job of selling his re-election bid at the 2012 convention to a former antagonist, Bill Clinton.

Hillary was not good at salesmanship either. The new book “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” reports that at one point, her 2016 team got so flummoxed at her inability to explain why she wanted to be president that they actually considered the slogan “Because It’s Her Turn.”

Trump did care about his product when he built Trump Tower. He obsessed over every detail of a building that was the flashy emblem of New York bursting out of the dark ’70s and into the booming ’80s.

“But the success of that went to his head and he never cared again,” his biographer Tim O’Brien told me. “He’s fundamentally lazy. He free-rides so many processes he doesn’t know anything about. He used to do it in the business world, and now he does it in the political world.

“He’s not a student of anything other than protecting his image. What he cares about is how he’s perceived, not the nuts and bolts of things. He is essentially a performance artist.”

When Trump talked to John Dickerson for “Face the Nation” last Sunday, he said the big difference between business and politics was that in Washington, “you really need heart, because you’re talking about a lot of people. Whereas in business, you don’t need so much heart. You want to make a good deal.”

But with health care, Trump wanted to make a deal so badly he was heartless. One Republican senator, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, said that he would not vote for a health care bill that does not pass “the Jimmy Kimmel test”: “Would the child born with a congenital heart disease be able to get everything he or she would need in that first year of life?”

The House Republicans just wanted Trump off their backs. They had never pulled a real bill together because they thought Hillary would win and they could just snipe at her. The Irish undertaker and his crew were so desperate to prove they had not totally forgotten how to pass anything that they were willing to go with garbage.”

Dowd goes on to comment that the passage of this bill will have significant fallout for Republicans in the 2018 election and will provide an opening for Democrats to win back the House of Representatives.  I would like to think that this is true but I am not so sure. The Democrats have to get their act together and while many are blaming Hillary Clinton for a poorly managed campaign, the entire party has to shoulder the responsibility.  There were plenty of blunders that went beyond her campaign handlers.

Tony