gracchusdixit

Given that Republicans control not only the White House but both houses of Congress, their failure to fulfill a seven-year-old promise to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act came as a stunning shock.  This failure exposed deep and persistent fissures that continue to divide a political party which, just weeks ago, seemed unified by the improbable electoral victory of Donald Trump and positively giddy at the prospect of at long last being able to enact its cherished legislative agenda—an agenda designed to roll back not only Obamacare but every aspect of the social contract that began with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal nearly a century ago.

But this debacle revealed far more than that.  It exposed, once and for all, the fundamental fraud that lies at the heart of the Trump presidency.

Trump’s basic “pitch” to the American electorate was this:  Vote for me, because I’m a rich, successful businessman, I’m a “great negotiator,” I know how to get things done, I’m a “winner.”  As he never tired of telling his slavering and adoring crowds:  “We will have so much winning if I am elected that you may get bored with winning.”

The humiliating collapse of the Republican health care bill demonstrates with stark clarity that Donald J. Trump, far from being a winner, is an incompetent and clueless loser.

The first signal came several weeks ago when he breezily announced:  “Nobody ever knew health care could be this complicated.”  To which, the only reasonable response was:  Duh!

It quickly became apparent that Trump hadn’t even read the bill he was touting and was therefore unprepared to persuade reluctant Republicans as to its merits—assuming it had any.  Instead, he tried to bluster, bully, and intimidate.  First, he threatened nay-sayers with the prospect of electoral catastrophe in 2018 if they didn’t play ball.  When that threat didn’t work, he dispatched his henchmen, Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus, to demand that the bill be taken or left as it had been written.  When even these feckless tactics failed, Trump metaphorically threw up his hands, declaring:  “We have learned a lot about the vote-getting process.”  It apparently didn’t occur to him that the time to learn about the “vote-getting process” was before the votes were needed, not after they failed to materialize.

Nor was this particular defeat a singular or exceptional humiliation.  Virtually everything Trump has touched since taking the oath of office has turned to ashes and dust.  His ill-considered Muslim ban ground to a halt in the Federal Courts immediately, and the revised second version has met the same fate.  His “big, beautiful wall” is not only not going to be paid for by the Mexicans, it appears increasingly unlikely that it will be paid for by Republicans in Congress.  His cabinet appointees have turned out to be vacuous, ineffectual, or ethically disastrous.  Attorney General Jeff Sessions lied to the Senate during his confirmation hearings.  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson embarrassed himself during his first trip abroad, to Asia, and is now being called “the phantom Secretary” by our closest allies.  Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is mired in scandal because of his investments in the Bank of Cyrus, which notoriously launders money for Russian oligarchs and criminals, not to mention Paul Manafort, who for five months was Donald Trump’s campaign manager.

To top it all off, there is the intractable problem that Trump and his closest confidantes are being investigated by the FBI for possibly “coordinating” with the Russians to tip the 2016 election in Trump’s favor.  No matter how often Trump dismisses all this as a “hoax,” no matter how much he tries to obstruct its course or cover his tracks, the stench of scandal simply will not go away.  In this, as in everything else, Donald J. Trump is proving to be singularly incompetent.

To anyone who bothered to take even a cursory glance at Trump’s career before he lunged into politics, his “pitch” to the electorate was absurd on its face.  Trump has never been the “winner” that he claims to be.  He is instead—to use the one word that he probably hates the most—a perpetual “loser.”  He has declared bankruptcy six times.  The list of his business failures is endless.  The number of investors he has hoodwinked and bilked is beyond counting.

Nor does he come even remotely close to being a member of the rarified club of the genuinely rich and famous, who dominate the landscape of his natural habitat, New York City.  He has never been invited to join the board of even one of New York’s premier cultural or artistic institutions.  He has never been recognized, let alone honored, by any of its major charitable or philanthropic organizations. To those who populate the world of money, power, and prestige in the “Big Apple,” Trump, far from being the billionaire business mogul he pretends to be, is, and always has been, a low-rent huckster, operating at the margins.

In MGM’s glorious 1939 rendering of the Wizard of Oz, the defining moment comes when Dorothy and her companions pull back the curtain, only to discover that “the Great and Powerful Oz,” the wizard who has held the kingdom in thrall, is nothing more than a bumbling carnival barker from Kansas.

Thanks to the debacle of “Trumpcare,” we have experienced our own version of this defining moment.  If Donald Trump has any particular skill or talent, it has little to do with creating enduringly successful businesses and has everything to do with conning people into believing that he is what he pretends to be.  The charitable word for his skill is “salesmanship.”  The more accurate word is “fraud.”

Thanks to the debacle of “repeal and replace,” the curtain has been pulled back, and we have seen the tawdry reality that underpins “the Great and Powerful Oz.”  It is not too late to send him back to where he came from.