Pure Rage and Spite

The Affordable Care Act, also known as the ACA and Obamacare, was never a perfect law. Nonetheless, it was a vast improvement over the health care market before it was enacted.

Many Republicans have not supported the measure but could never articulate why in a convincing argument, considering it was markedly like a plan their party once supported, nor could they come up with a better alternative. They resorted to lies to demonize a plan that is actually working fairly well in most parts of the country, and they tried hard to kill something that is helping tens of millions of Americans.

Donald Trump opposed the ACA when he was running for President, and he fabricated a whole lot of lies about it. He's a racist at heart and his dislike of his successful and popular predecessor fueled his irrational rage -- anything President Obama was for, he is against.

Trump has methodically tried to dismantle and destroy most of the signature improvements of the Obama administration, from the environment to equal rights to the economy to ethics and, now, to health care. Because Congress failed to enact any kind of health law, notwithstanding numerous attempts, Trump will now try to destroy the ACA on his own.

On Thursday and Friday, Trump rolled out a number of actions designed to cripple the ACA and make health care unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans. He's deliberately harming millions of ordinary people because he's a hypocritical demagogue who can't stand that Obama was a far better President than he'll ever be.

The New York Times published an excellent FAQ of sorts (link here) about the ten most damaging things Trump has done to the ACA to date. Some of these are petty and others are cruel, like delibrately shutting down the enrollment website during peak hours or systematically spreading false stories about the ACA -- that's the sort of thing done in dictatorships, not democracies.

A huge majority of Americans are opposed to what Trump is doing. A new Kaiser Family Foundation poll released yesterday (link here) shows that 71 percent of Americans want Trump to improve the ACA, which is the exact opposite of what he's doing.

Once again, Trump is pandering only to his reactionary base, who think the ACA is a bad thing, notwithstanding it has benefitted many of them. Trump is shafting the majority of Americans because he thinks somehow the 30 percent who still support him will carry him to reelection.

Earlier this week, Greg Sargent wrote a terrific piece for The Washington Post (link here) with the title "As Trump implodes, he threatens to hurt millions — out of pure rage and spite." The column is an excellent analysis of how an incompetent, emotionally crippled President is trying to do as much damage as possible, simply because he's driven by hate and narcissism.

In short, if Trump can't make a name for himself by making Americans' lives better, he'll make a name for himself by making their lives worse. It's a trait he shares with the most dangerous and egomaniacal of dictators.