[JayGalt]

I got to tell you this was the best Rush column I have ever seen.
Trump is a pragmatist. He wants to get things done for the American people, more things that can be done in 8 years. Get in his way, it’s the highway. How the hell else is anything going to get done? By jawing some more?

Did I like the healthcare bill. Hell no, did I voice my disapproval, you better bet I did. But I trusted that if it were passed it would be changed enough that we could get to a free market healthcare system and a limited saftey net or Trump wouldn’t sign it.

[Yosemitest]

"But I trusted that if it were passed it would be changed enough that we could get to a free market healthcare system and a limited saftey net
or Trump wouldn’t sign it."

Your trust is misplaced.

Read what Rush's article Scenarios and Theories: What Happened on Friday? And What Happens Next? from Mar 27, 2017.
He covered the subject very well ... of how he perceived what Trump and his administration's strategy is.
(That article really is worth your time, even though it's very long.)
Let's go three quarters of the way into that article.

" ... Try this.
There is a theory here
that the Machiavellian Steve Bannon wanted this to fail
and wanted it to fail to actually help Trump in two ways:
A, You blame it on Ryan.
Make sure everybody realizes that Paul Ryan is who’s standing in Trump’s way.
Create movement and inertia to get rid of Ryan, because Bannon doesn’t like him anyway,
according to news accounts and reports even before the election, during the campaign.
And so the loss here has a long-game aspect to it.
This bill never had a chance of passing, it never had a chance, goes the theory,
because the bill was horrible.
The bill was Obamacare.
It left too much of Obamacare intact.
It had to go down to defeat.

There’s another aspect.
Not only do you blame Ryan, you get to blame the conservatives.
You throw most of the blame on the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows and his gang, as the usual culprits.
The conservatives are always the ones standing in the way. See?
They’re the ones that wouldn’t move.
They’re the ones that denied the new president.
They’re the ones that stood in the way of Trump winning, they’re the ones, they’re the ones.
Trump is not ideological.
And there is a war on conservatives in Washington every day.
There has been a war on conservatives every day for the last 50 years.

So it just depends on how deeply you want to take this.
But I’d rather try to say focused on the reality of this, and the reality is the bill failed.
Now, you can juice that up by getting into the theories of
why,
who’s to blame,
could Trump have stopped this?
I mean, the people over at Vox — let me find this one little passage here to explain how the people at Vox were reporting this.
They basically said that
here you have Donald Trump, a president who doesn’t even know what’s in the bill,
had no idea what was in it.

Here it is.
“Donald Trump promised to be a different kind –”
now, Vox is a Millennial, left-wing news outfit, and their game is that they don’t report the news; they explain it.
That’s how they allow their opinion to be inserted into the news.
And so Ezra Klein, who used to be at the Washington Post, said,

“Donald Trump promised to be a different kind of president.
He was a populist fighting on behalf of the ‘forgotten man,’
taking on the GOP establishment, draining the Washington swamp,
protecting Medicaid from cuts, vowing to cover everyone with health care and make the government pay for it.
He was a pragmatic businessman who was going to make Washington work for you, the little guy, not the ideologues and special interests.

“Instead, Trump has become a pitchman for Paul Ryan and his agenda.
He’s spent the past week fighting for a health care bill he didn’t campaign on, didn’t draft, doesn’t understand, doesn’t like to talk about, and can’t defend.
Rather than forcing the Republican establishment to come around to his principles, he’s come around to theirs — with disastrous results.”

This is intended as a theory of how Ryan played Trump.
Now, this is not the health care bill Trump campaigned on, by the way, the specifics of this bill.
The bill that Trump campaigned on, if there is such a thing, is the one that was passed in 2015 and sent up to Obama, who vetoed it.
This is an entirely different beast.
They threw things back in this bill from 2015, the House leadership did.
Trump did not write this, there’s no question,
but he did praise Paul Ryan to the hilt, and he joined right with Paul Ryan on this thing.

When he was selling the bill, he was not selling the bill, when he had these congressmen up to the White House.
He was not getting into the bill and telling them what was good about the bill and why they needed to support it.
He was selling it on the basis that he wanted it, that the party needed it, we need this win,
it was almost a win one for the Gipper kind of thing.
The Republicans with all their different factions said to heck with that, the bill is bad.
The conservative caucus didn’t like it in any way, shape, manner, or form.
The Tuesday Group didn’t like it ’cause it was too conservative.
The conservatives didn’t like it ’cause it was too moderate, and the one thing missing in it was Trump.
He was trying to unify all these people with the power of personality and power of persuasion.
And so now the gaming and the scheming begins. ... "

SO, what I think is ... the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows and his gang are the path to FREEDOM from that disaster that ObamaCare is,
and RyanCare was only going to make it worse !
Trump was "MAKING A DEAL" and we, the citizens of the United States, were going to get screwed !
Just THANK GOD that the Freedom Caucus, Mark Meadows and his gang SAVED US from that disaster !