Tactical methods for tricking the president
by digby
This is what it's come to. The Republicans are trying to figure out how to trick the imbecile who will be living in the White House into doing what they need him to do. But it's not easy because he's an undisciplined pathological liar.
From National Review:
After Rand Paul announced he had spoken with Trump, who agreed with him about making repeal and replace simultaneous, one congressional staffer suggested at a Capitol Hill meeting on health care that his boss could call Trump and get him to say the opposite. After Trump’s news conference last week, several members and staffers suggested (independently) that Trump must mean that repeal and replace should take effect simultaneously, rather than that they should be enacted simultaneously, in which case congressional Republicans were already on the same page as Trump. (And of course, that could very well be what Trump meant.) After Trump’s Washington Post interview this past Sunday, the conservative health-care universe, including some people on Trump’s own team, quickly concluded that the separate administration plan he described was entirely a figment of Trump’s imagination.
If you read that whole article you'll see that the Republicans in congress are trying to use a Machiavellian strategy to repeal Obamacare. They really, really want to do it. I'm not even sure they know why anymore. It's the Holy Grail.
But that paragraph suggests that Trump's stupidity may be what stops it. He is without any fundamental beliefs other than doing and saying anything to make the sale and when it comes to governing he doesn't know what "the sale" is or who he's selling it to. So he's entirely unpredictable. But that means there's a chance that he'll screw his own people for reasons that have nothing to do with the policy which he doesn't understand at all.
We have a puerile fool for president and a Republican Party that's at peak crazy. Pray for them to metaphorically shoot each other in the foot. For the time being, that's the best we can hope for, at least until enough of the population wakes up* and puts them out of office.
*And that means mobilization. Lot's of things for citizens to do to make that happen. Read all about it.
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