President Donald Trump, involved first-hand in the arduous work of pushing sweeping health care reform through Congress, sounds so over it.
At a series of events, meetings and interviews over the last month, Trump has expressed the desire to get health care reform behind him so that his administration can get to work on other issues he appears to enjoy talking about more: Trade and tax reform.
“We want a very big tax cut,” Trump said at a campaign rally Monday night in Louisville, Kentucky. “But we cannot do that until we keep our promise to repeal and replace the disaster known as Obamacare.”
Later in the event Trump made the same argument on trade deals.
“Oh, I’m looking forward to these trade deals,” he said. “There is going to be no ambiguity.”
The feeling could complicate his ability to sell the bill, something the President will be asked to do countless times before the bill that could get a vote in the House as early as Thursday ever reaches his desk. If Trump is seen as wanting to get things over with on health care, it could give members on both the left and the right leverage to extract larger concessions out of Trump as a way for him to get to his goal.
Trump is on Capitol Hill Tuesday to sell the Republican bill. In the meeting, according to sources, Trump said that not passing the bill could have political repercussions and possibly lead to Republicans losing their majority in 2018.
Aides on Capitol Hill, many of whom have worked tirelessly on the legislation, have wondered if Trump — who made his name as a deal maker — can close the health care deal.
“So here we are: Can he actually close this deal,” one aide asked rhetorically. “This whole thing has been contingent on the idea that the answer to that is yes. We’ll see today.”
Even when Trump conciliatory heralded Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who has been a vocal critic of the bill, Monday, the President nodded to the fact that he wanted to move on.
“He’s a good guy. And I look forward to working with him so that we can get this bill passed in some form so that we can pass massive tax reform which we can’t do until this happens,” Trump said, adding, “So we got to get this done before we can do the other. In other words, we have to know what this is before we can do the big tax cuts. We got to get it done for a lot of reasons but that’s one of them.”
This is far from the first time Trump has signaled he is eager to move on from the first legislative push his administration.
At a similar campaign rally in Nashville earlier this month, Trump conceded that he “would have loved” to cut taxes first in a speech where he spoke for 25 minutes before mentioning health care.
“I want to get to taxes,” he said. “I want to cut the hell out of taxes.”
Trump made a similar case in an interview with Fox News last week.
“One of the reasons I want to get it finished, ideally soon, is because I want to start on the taxes,” he told host Tucker Carlson.
The sentiment could stem from the fact Trump has seemingly been surprised by the complexity that comes with health care.
“Now, I have to tell you, it’s an unbelievably complex subject,” Trump said during a meeting with governors in February. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.”
