“Ah, that’s the big question,” Trump said with a slight chuckle. “Don’t know. I have a good relationship with them, but I couldn’t get them. They just wouldn’t do it.”
Trump alluded to long-running, simmering dramas on Capitol Hill, which he said had little to do with him, as a reason the Freedom Caucus could not back the bill.
“Years of hatred and distrust,” he said. “Long before me.” Was Trump saying, perhaps, that the inability of Ryan and his team to work well with that caucus was part of why talks stalled?
“Well, look, you can say what you want,” Trump said. “But there are years of problems, great hatred and distrust, and, you know, I came into the middle of it.”
“I think they made a mistake, but that’s okay,” Trump said of the Freedom Caucus.
I asked: Would working on a bipartisan health-care deal a year from now be something he would find more agreeable than whipping the hard right?
“A lot of people might say that,” Trump said, laughing. “We’ll end up with a better health-care plan. A great plan. And you wouldn’t need the Freedom Caucus.”
What about the moderates, the Tuesday Group?
“They were great,” Trump said. “They were really great"
Is this real?
Trump called Bob Costas to say these things?
Here we go. The Freedom Caucus may have just cut off their nose to spite their face. I heard Trump in the Oval Office too talking about how they can do a bipartisan deal if Obamacare collapses. The Freedom Caucus would not be necessary. Instead of getting something, they will get nothing.
Robert Costa was a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal. He was later hired by the National Review as a reporter in 2010. In December 2012, he was promoted to the position of Washington editor for National Review. While at National Review, Costa was a contributor for CNBC, frequently appearing on The Kudlow Report, and for MSNBC.
Wasn’t Bob Costa the guy Trump wouldn’t take questions from early on as he called his network fake news and skipped over him?
“We couldn’t get one Democratic vote, and we were a little bit shy, very little, but it was still a little bit shy, so we pulled it,” Trump said.”
Not even one Democratic vote.
That shows why it is important for the Republicans to control the House.
Trump is essentially correct.
Trump is playing congress like a fiddle.
The President’s number is blocked on Costa’s cell phone ?