Will Trump Be Trapped by ACA Repeal?

President-elect is walking into a minefield

President Barack Obama, whether wittingly or not, invested his entire political capital in reforming healthcare in America. He gambled and lost. Not because he had nefarious intentions, but because he left the gory details to a corrupt Congress and a shady cadre of lying and conniving technocrats, ending up with something vastly different from what he campaigned on. From everything I'm reading now, President-elect Donald Trump is about to walk in Mr. Obama's footsteps, and if he does, the results will be unsurprisingly identical.

On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly stated that Bernie Sanders forfeited his place in history when he "made a deal with the devil" and embraced the corrupt Democratic Party establishment that fought his candidacyMedicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Those are the things he campaigned on, and this is the mandate that comes with his election, nothing more and nothing less either. The conservative apparatus that rode into power on his surprisingly long coattails has no independent mandate. Donald Trump was elected President of the United States by the people of these United States in spite of the Republican Party, not because of it. We did not send Mr. Trump to the White House to help Speaker Ryan and his conservative posse of faux intellectuals to dismantle the big bad "welfare state." I can only hope that the President-elect understands that the manufactured urgency of repealing Obamacare, while blowing up Medicare, is nothing but a shrewdly laid trap for him personally, for