Lightning crashing around his castle, Trump pledges to bring Obamacare repeal back from the dead

Lightning strikes behind the Washington Monument in August 2003. (Rich Lipski/The Washington Post)

One of the challenges that Donald Trump faces in applying his pre-presidential habits to his presidency is that he’s not actually used to the incessant glare of attention that comes with the job. He was a celebrity before running for office, sure, and could make an appearance in the tabloids at will. But it wasn’t the case that everything he said made national headlines.

The exponential increase in attention is tricky for Trump, because one of his go-to rhetorical tactics is to amp up the hyperbole of what he’s saying. He went from criticizing President Barack Obama’s prosecution of the war on terror to saying that he was literally the founder of the Islamic State. He went from criticizing Hillary Clinton’s emails to saying that it made her ineligible to serve as president to saying she should be arrested to saying that he would have her arrested as president. Trump lives on applause lines, and he’s learned over time that you have to keep tweaking the knob a bit to ensure that you keep the audience hooked. So everything gets amplified — and in an environment where he’s constantly in the limelight, those tweaks happen really quickly.

So Trump’s rhetoric on Obamacare goes from “it’s a threat” to “it’s failing” to “it’s dead” to … whatever this is.

How do you make the Republican failure to pass an overhaul of Obamacare seem even more dramatically the fault of the opposition (despite the failure being entirely a function of a lack of Republican support)? Throw in a chorus of Democrats wailing about death, I guess.

But, to pull an Arlo Guthrie in “Alice’s Restaurant,” I’m not here to talk about Trump’s escalating hyperbole. I’m here to talk about the actual point that Trump is making about Republicans not selling the bill.

The plan, as it stands, is to try to resuscitate the Senate overhaul bill that died two deaths this week. The first was when Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) came out in opposition to the bill, meaning that there weren’t enough votes within the Republican caucus to pass it. The second was when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell then proposed a straight repeal vote — which was quickly shown to also lack enough support to pass. Trump has summoned Senate Republicans to the White House on Wednesday where he will presumably try to wrangle a deal, as promised to the American people on the campaign trail. (That’s the otherwise inexplicable “lunchtime” reference in the tweet.)

Trump seems to think that the problem was one of salesmanship, as a hammer might have only one idea of what to do with a nail. Tell America that the health-care bill is good and then they will like it, the theory seems to go, and then you can pass it.

There are a few problems with this strategy.

The first is that people actually have a good sense of what’s in Republican bills introduced in the House and Senate — and they don’t like it. The Kaiser Family Foundation polls on health-care issue regularly and found this month that people had distinct reasons for strongly opposing or supporting the Republican bills.

More than 6 in 10 Americans have a very unfavorable view of the legislation, focused on the negative effects on people and the cost considerations. (Another survey question found that about a third of Americans were familiar with the Congressional Budget Office reports that detailed those numbers — though only a fifth of that group remembered the finding that the number of people with insurance would decrease over a decade.) Of the 3 in 10 Americans who have a favorable view — 11 percent have no opinion on the legislation — about a third support it simply because it repeals Obamacare. A fifth support it because it reforms the insurance system; another fifth because they believe it will make health care more affordable.

In broad strokes, those are the cases that supporters and opponents of the legislation have made. That 19 percent of those who back the bill do so because they think it will bring costs down is precisely the case that the Republicans have been making — and, even though the CBO points out that this will happen only after costs rise, it is sticking.

The broader problem that Republicans have in “discuss[ing] how good their healthcare bill is” is that there aren’t a lot of non-Republican-politician types that are willing to help make that case. The CBO’s analysis isn’t flattering to the legislation, noting that it would basically cut taxes on the rich to raise costs on those with less money. Outside groups have largely lined up against the bill, including most advocacy organizations and even some insurers. People are savvy enough to understand that the arguments of politicians should be taken with a grain of salt, and the GOP doesn’t have many other voices that it can amplify.

But also: Come on, Mr. President. You’ve done almost nothing to make the case for the bill yourself.

We looked at this on Monday. He tweets about health care with some regularity, but the sales pitch is two-pronged: Obamacare is bad and the Republican bill is great. That’s no more of a sales pitch than a big billboard that reads “Coca-Cola is a good drink.” On only five occasions since the House introduced its bill has Trump tweeted anything specific about health-care reform (and most of those tweets were inaccurate).

Not only that, Trump has actually undercut the Republican effort, calling the House bill “mean.”

Kaiser found that most Americans understand that the Republican bills also aren’t what Trump promised on the campaign trail.

He set a standard that was impossible to meet and then criticizes his team for not meeting it. And while he does that, he distances himself from his constant pledges to repeal Obamacare, pinning the failure to repeal it on “them,” the Republicans in the Senate who balked. As though he never mentioned Obamacare at all.

Trump seems to be convinced that all this thing needs is a good kick in the pants from a master marketer and dealmaker. (It’s also possible that he’s just trying to put a win on the board after getting blasted for the past day for doing nothing.) Maybe that’s the case. But it’s also possible that these bills are like a few other past Trump efforts — like a casino or two or his USFL team: Failures.

In business, Trump could declare bankruptcy or just sell the thing off. That’s the other thing about being president: He can’t do that. And taking a loss in the Oval Office gets you a lot more media attention, too.