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For the fourth time, the Republican Senators have failed to deliver to President Donald Trump something he wanted desperately to fulfill a promise he had made to his base of white racist Americans during the presidential election. It was also something around which the Republicans had rallied their base of supporters since 2010 when it was enacted during the tenure of President Barack Obama when the Democrats controlled both the Houses of the Congress.
The promise that the Republican Senators failed to deliver was repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known popularly as Obamacare, the healthcare policy of the United States. The Republican Senators failed the last time in July to pass a revised repeal of the Act - the "Skinny" repeal act - because of the defection of three key Senators, among them was Senator John McCain. This time, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allowed the bill to repeal fail without seeking a vote - which was scheduled for last week - on its fate with the same Republican Senators that had voted against it last time stating beforehand they would do the same again. Thus the four failures to repeal Obamacare occurred when the Republicans have the majority in the Senate.
The predicament of being unlucky for the fourth time for the President came at a time when he had little to show but failures in his eight months in office. His promise to build the Mexican Wall with Mexican Government's money failed embarrassingly when the Mexican President turned down the offer to be the first visitor to the White House under the Trump presidency. His Muslim Ban with which he had energised his racist base was passed as an Executive Order that fell well short of what he had promised. And to top it all, North Korea and Iran both met President Trump's threats against them by testing missiles to tell him to mind his own business. Through these failures, President Trump has already started the process of the decline of America as the leader of the West.
Nevertheless, these failures did not seem to bother President Donald Trump too much. He has by now established that for him little else mattered as long as his racist base supported him at the same level of frenzy as they had during the presidential election. The President hoped that repealing Obamacare would create in his racist base the same frenzy, perhaps more, and the failures with the Mexican Wall, Muslim Ban, etcetera would be forgotten
President Trump was convinced his racist base of White Americans felt as he did that a coloured President in the White House was a nightmare. He thus targeted President Obama in 2011 with the fraudulent "birther movement" to establish he was born abroad to make his presidency illegal and unconstitutional and erase his name from US history. The Republicans shared the same mindset; that for them it was unacceptable that a coloured politician was in the White House and furthermore, he had the audacity to try to build a legacy for that was how the Republicans viewed Obamacare. President Trump thus wanted to overcome his failures and energise his racist base with the repeal of Obamacare.
And Obamacare did have in it the stuff that creates and sustains a legacy. The United States is the only developed country where the state provides no safety net for the healthcare of its citizens who have to buy health insurance from health insurance companies or else treat themselves with medicine available off the counter. In case of life-threatening illnesses, they had only God Almighty to depend upon. Before Obamacare nearly 1/6th Americans had no health insurance because they could not afford one.
Obamacare, however, was designed not like other western countries to provide universal healthcare but as its official title suggests, to enable the poor and disadvantaged by a series of incentives and negotiations with the health insurers to buy health insurance at affordable prices. As happens with major government policies, the ACA had teething problems. But when President Trump went to the White House, Obamacare was working as it was intended in providing healthcare to the poor and disadvantaged. In fact, it was the poor among the white racists who benefitted from Obamacare that helped derail the attempts to repeal Obamacare.
US history is by no means a glorious one. The stigma of slavery, uncalled-for wars abroad in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan that killed millions of innocent men, women and children lie heavily on the consciousness of every American. Attempt to repeal Obamacare is of the same nature. It is against human conscience because if it succeeds, it will add a new stigma to the American conscience. The attempts to repeal Obamacare is not just anti-poor; it is inhuman as well because, without Obamacare, millions of Americans would again be in the care of the elements for their healthcare and many would die as a result.
Race and contempt for the poor thus played a major part in the move to repeal Obamacare. If this was not disgusting enough, the President and the Republican Party eyed the huge amount of money from scrapping Obamacare for the President's major legislative agenda, namely tax reforms, to give huge tax benefits to the country's rich and the wealthy. If ever there was a case of double jeopardy against the poor in the action of a government, then the narrative to repeal Obamacare should be the best example of such a jeopardy. President Trump and the Republicans wanted to repeal Obamacare not just to deprive the poor of health care (and President Obama of a legacy); they wanted it so that they could give tax benefits to the rich and the wealthy.
The Republicans, of course, have a rationale to convince themselves to go into denial over the double jeopardy. They believe that the tax breaks to the rich and the wealthy and to businesses and investors would jumpstart the economy. The tax breaks to businesses at home would mean American investors abroad would bring their investments back to the country and jobs galore would be created, push wages up and milk and honey would flow everywhere in the country that would also benefit the poor. If ever a fairy tale was used to help the rich of a country, then President Donald Trump and the Republican Party should be given the credit for the proposed tax reforms.
And while the attempts to repeal Obamacare was failing, President Donald Trump was busy finding out new ways to energise his base because, in the end, it is all he cares for. He thus picked on the black football players who were using their freedom of expression granted to them under the US Constitution. Nicknamed in the media as "anthem protest", a number of black football players have decided to kneel during the playing of the national anthem instead of standing up with a hand on their hearts. The protests were against police brutalities against blacks all over America, now on the increase since President Trump took office.
President Trump picked on one of the black players, called him a "bum" and a "sob" and asked the football association to sack him. He identified the "anthem protest" as an unpatriotic act in an attempt to create an "us versus them" complicating the issue further by pointing at the blacks as "unpatriotic". The President's case on patriotism was dismissed by most Americans because not too long ago, he had said that there were "good people" in the crowd of white racists who had paraded in Charlottesville under Nazi and KKK flags.
The United States of America is passing through perilous times with President Donald Trump at the helm. Its place as a world power is declining while internally, it has never been more divided. The failure to repeal Obamacare is the only sign of hope for those who wish well for the United States although the path ahead for the American ship that Trump is navigating is murky.
The writer is a former Ambassador.