Trump Puts Off Health Care, Pivots Back to Immigration

RUSH: I wonder what happened out there, folks. I wonder what happened. Trump has canceled — I’m sorry. Wrong word. Trump has postponed the health care plan until after the 2020 election. Happened last night. Trump postponed his plans to make Republicans into the party of great health care. Look. I understand this.

Greetings. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, behind the Golden EIB Microphone. 800-282-2882, and email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.us

Let me tell you what I think happened. I haven’t spoken to anybody. Well, I mean, I haven’t spoken to anybody in the White House or anybody associated with any of the presidential strategery on this in quite a while. But remember it seemed out of the blue the president started talking about reviving health care again, getting rid of Obamacare, just a week or so ago, after suffering mightily from doing so in the 2018 midterms.

Everybody is scratching their head, “What’s going on?” And I was among those scratching my head saying, “What’s going on?” Because the border situation is getting worse by the day. That’s the issue Trump got elected on. It’s the issue he campaigned on. And out of the blue it seems like it vanished from the top of the priority list and was replaced by Obamacare.

Now, I think the president has a lot of people around him who have, shall we say, mutual interests. They want what’s best for the president, and they want what’s best according to what they think. And if any of those people, if any of those advisers happen to be of the traditional Republican, Washington mind-set, they’re gonna be defensive. They are going to preoccupied with what is said about them, primarily in the Drive-By Media.

There is also a desire on the part — I think this is genuine on the part of the president. It’d be great — he even said this in his recent revival — to push a total abolition of Obamacare, that he wants the Republican Party to be the party that’s associated with great health care for everybody. That would be a massive transformation.

You know, Obamacare, it’s got his name in it, and it’s health care for everybody, and a lot of dummkopfs think it was free. And so trying to wrest that mantle away from the Democrats would be an admirable thing if Republicans could be associated with health care, but not single payer. Not Medicare for all. So they have to come up with a program, and they hadn’t.

And that is a tangible issue. Health care. Everybody needs it, everybody uses it, everybody’s focused on it, everybody’s worried about it. So if you can be the guy that solves it and removes the worry and the threat and comes through with a plan that enables people to access health care with as little pain as possible, then you stand to benefit greatly.

On the other hand, the issue at the border involves what? Well, it’s not as tangle as health care, in terms of perception. If you live in Pennsylvania, if you live in Wisconsin, Illinois, if you live anywhere but in a border state, you hear about it, you see pictures about it, and you may be impacted by the arrival of criminal elements of the illegal immigration so-called community. But it really isn’t as tangible to you as it is to people that live in border states. And it certainly isn’t as tangible as something like health care is.

You can reach out and touch it, is what I mean by tangible. And it impacts everybody on a personal level, much more than illegal immigration is perceived to. I think illegal immigration has a far greater deleterious effect on our society and culture at large than anybody is willing to admit or discuss openly. So I think it’s even much more tangible than health care is, but the perception is not that.

In addition, who is it that is illegally crossing the border? They are people of color. They are brown people, they are black people, they are Latinos and you run the gamut. And so it lends itself for instant demagoguery. The president is opposed to immigration because he’s a racist. And I think there’s some advisers in the president’s circle who have this sensitivity, that any opposition to illegal immigration can easily be tagged as racist or bigoted or separating children from their mothers, it’s so horrible. And all you need is one picture of each allegation to make the point.

So I think there’s a lot of advisers around the president who are telling him that the biggest “oomph” possible policy-wide would be to come up with something that fixes health care, that makes it known to everybody the Republicans did it because it affects virtually everybody, stand to gain one heck of a lot. I think this is some of the advice that he’s getting. I don’t want to name names because I don’t know for sure. So I don’t want to sit here and speculate.

But the odds are that if the advisors I’m talking about do indeed come from the swamp in Washington, this is what I think happened. And then somebody realized, “Wait a minute, whatever we come up with on health care isn’t gonna see the light of day because the Democrats run the House. There isn’t anything gonna change. No Democrat is gonna vote for any health care proposal that in any way gives the Republicans the identity of a solution, that helps the Republicans make the issue their own.”

So somebody realized that it’s a nonstarter even maybe as a campaign issue. But certainly nothing more than a campaign issue because there just simply aren’t the votes for it because the Democrats run the House. So the president now says that he is going to postpone his plans to make Republicans the party of great health care until after the 2020 elections. He said the vote will be taken right after the election when the Republicans hold the Senate and win back the House. “It will be truly great health care that will work for America.”

See, it was just last week that the president was trying to move this forward, seemingly out of the blue with his singular identity and push on the immigration issue seemingly taking a backseat or even an invisible seat.

There’s also something else involved in this health care business and that is even among Republicans in the Senate, they just didn’t seem to have the desire to move forward on this. Democrats ran on improving the health care system in 2018, and they won. I think ultimately that something singularly bothersome hasn’t changed, and that is the defensive mentality that exists among Republicans in Washington. Never Trumpers outside of Washington, wherever they are, but certainly those inside the Beltway.

And the defensiveness stems from being afraid of media allegations which then become Democrat Party allegations, and those allegations always revolve around it’s racist, it’s bigoted, or it’s sexist or it’s homophobic or what have you. And so policy wizards seek to come up with ways to avoid those allegations, and that’s why I think they singled in on health care because everybody would benefit and everybody would think the Republican Party is wonderful and very cool if they fixed it.

So now the president is going to pivot back to immigration and not a moment too soon. It remains the singular most important number one issue. And the Democrats are scared to death of the president focusing on it. His threat last week to close the border has them going bonkers, alleging that it will kill the American economy, destroy whatever economic momentum we’ve got. Except they’re out there saying that there isn’t all that great an economy, Trump’s lying, he’s making it up.

But then when it comes time to disparage shutting down the border for a while, all of a sudden the economy’s doing well enough that the Democrats can run around and talk about the damage that will occur if Trump does this. But it’s patently obvious why the Democrats don’t want the border shut. It’s patently obvious why they want this continuing invasion, this flow of people into the country. I think what’s misunderstood about this issue is the amount of support for getting a handle on this and stopping it that there is all across all spectrums of our population.

I believe that if Trump does this right, if he did it right, that 50% of Hispanics would support him. And I think 75% of the public would. And I think the Democrats know this. And I think they’re scared to death of it. They don’t want anything to happen to give the president that kind of confidence.

When you compare health care to solving the border issue, which of the two is more complicated, do you think? You might think that’s a tough question. I frankly think that health care is much more complicated to solve, comprehensive health care reform is much more complicated to solve than simply making a decision to enforce the law tto fix immigration! All we gotta do is enforce the law! To fix illegal immigration, it’s just a matter of getting tough and enforcing the law, listening to the Border Patrol people, listening to ICE.

Meanwhile, Luis Gutierrez is out there saying we need to be building welcoming centers all over the country, not just at the border. Welcoming centers all over the country. Of course, Luis Gutierrez, Democrat, Illinois, member of the House, thinks that, because that’s exactly how they want to be seen greeting these people. There is a simple violation of law taking place here, and nobody seems to address that aspect of what’s going on.

But to those of us who think immigration is the singular problem we face, the fix is not that complicated. Enforce the law! “It’s so hard, Rush, because you would have to tell people ‘no.’” Well, for crying out loud, we tell ’em they can’t rob banks every day. We tell people they can’t kill each other every day. We tell people all kinds of things every day that might hurt their feelings or might disappoint them or might deny them things.

“Yeah, but this is different. These are people that are suffering and they’re fleeing war-torn poverty and we just can’t say ‘no.’” For the benefit of the world we better say “no” because if we cease being who we are, the world has no place to turn to, which in fact might be an objective of some of the anti-American hating leftists around the world.

But health care is so complicated to sell, by the way, the Democrats could ruin Trump as they did in the midterms, especially if the program you have is not fully formed and one that you can’t present as an alternative to what you’re getting rid of.

With the RATS in control in the House whatever Trump proposes it is DOA. However, I would suggest that he continue to hammer the illegal invasion and that he also start to push Trump alternatives to Obamacare, or at least have something ready to go when the RATS bring it up. I wouldn’t even bother to talk to the idiots in the GOP in the congress, they had 6 years to come up with an alternative and couldn’t find their own asses if they had too.

ACA participation is down. Medicaid is down. Why?

JOBS!

JOBS are the best Healthcare Policy of Trump.

But now immigration and trade policies are suppressing a bigger GDP and job growth and economic growth.

Trump would be smart to focus on more deregulation. (Whether he tweets about it or not is a separate issue.)

Deregulation is win win for everyone ... but the bureaucrats. Maybe the bureaucrats could fill some of the private sector jobs going begging... if private employers could be convinced the ex-bureaucrats would be good workers.

To me, immigration is not a big priority...because I live in Florida

The democrats are using legal and illegal immigration to build their base throughout the country and its working. 70% of new immigrants vote democrat, They are turning red states purple and purple states blue.

If we don't get immigration right soon nothing else will matter. The democrats will have a monopoly on power.

The loss of our southern border makes 2020 merely a footnote in history. "Bread and circus" issues like healthcare will be pouring a bucket of water on a forest fire when our nation collapses.
Some states might take responsibility for their own defense like Hungary and Poland in Europe but right now I don't see it.

“We have more to lose as far as elections from not addressing health care than we do regarding immigration.”

That’s true. Low-IQ voters, i.e., Democrat voters, “get” the healthcare issue more than they do illegal immigration. Even though the immigration probably impacts their lives negatively more than healthcare, it’s a nebulous thing. Their little pea-pickin’ brains can’t comprehend it. It’s too haaaarrrd.

Exactly my point.

To slightly modify P.T. Barnum- no one ever lost an election underestimating the intelligence of the American public (or probably any other electorate in history).

“A man who chases two rabbits catches neither”

As much as I support deporting anyone who deserves it, and fo COURSE securing the border, etc, Healthcare is a bigger issue to the folks who will actually decide 2020. Those who want to re-elect President Trump aren’t going anywhere else, the hardcore leftists are never going to vote for Trump, but the folks in the middle- particularly the subset of them who WILL or are likely to vote but could go either way- need healthcare.

People can pontificate forever that ‘it shouldn’t be the government’s business’, but the FACT is that a 48 year old with cancer or the 32 year old with a disabled kid, or the 70 year old who can’t afford their medications care a hell of a lot more about this ‘great plan’ that Trump promised in 2016 than they care about people streaming over the border. If you rea recently laid off or otherwise not covered, nothing else matters for a lot of people. Either the Republicans deal with that, NOW, or lose in 2020 with the subsequent codification of the invasion

“... care a hell of a lot more about this ‘great plan’ that Trump promised in 2016 than they care about people streaming over the border.”

Definitely, especially with so many baby boomers realizing so many age-related health issues. DH and I noticed that with our mothers, who had been pretty conservative through most of their lives. The older they got, the more they expected Uncle Sugar to take care of them. I guess it’s natural; I don’t know.

In any case, that personal desperation will shove immigration to the back burner come election day.

There are more people who would rather live as an ethnic minority in a socialist country but have health care, than there are swing voters in crucial electoral states; the question is to what degree these overlap. Someone facing bankruptcy to keep themselves or their loved one alive for another 15 years simply does not generally care anywhere nearly as much about any other issue. People can pontificate all they want about ideological purity, but winning elections are all about self-interest.

No viable health care plan = Harris/Buttgeig 2020, at which point any hope of ever doing something about the border is gone.

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