While President Donald Trump is on a working vacation, he tweeted that he wants Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to “get back to work” on health care repeal and reform, according to CNN. At least Trump claims that he’s working while he’s golfing for the 21 time since his inauguration. Regardless, Trump thinks that McConnell should be doing more about the whole repeal and replace deal.
Trump is clearly upset that repealing and replacing Obamacare is taking longer than he had expected. But health care reform of any kind takes time. Granted, those of us who don’t want any variation of Trumpcare to replace the Affordable Care Act don’t really mind the wait.
McConnell explained why he hasn’t lived up to Trump’s expectations to ABC News. “Part of the reason I think that the storyline is that we haven’t done much is because, is in part, the president and others have set these early timelines about things need to be done by a certain point,” he said. You mean replacing a national health care policy takes time? Shocking.
Apparently, Trump’s somewhat aggressive tweets about McConnell were sparked by the rest of McConnell’s interview with ABC News. “Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before. And I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process. So part of the reason I think people feel we're underperforming is because too many artificial deadlines—unrelated to the reality of the complexity of legislating—may not have been fully understood.” Trump might have thought that McConnell was personally attacking his credibility, but let’s face it, Trump doesn’t have any previous experience in health care.
While Trump obviously seems pretty peeved that McConnell wasn’t able to meet his expectations, at least Trump gave him some form of backhanded compliment positive reinforcement by telling him he “can do it.” Maybe Trump took a memo from Shia LaBeouf’s infamous “Just Do It” motivational video. Regardless, I can’t wait to see what other “tough love tactics” Trump is going to use on his other health care reform scapegoats.