Health Care is Trump’s Achilles Heel

Medicaid was the reason he backed off on the spending freeze

Donald Trump’s lightning fast ignominious cave-in on the spending freeze issue was surprising to some. Too many Democrats have been cowering in fear as he spent the first week plus of his second term sweeping through Washington with one crazy, extreme act after the next. All of a sudden, though, the spending freeze ground his arrogant team’s string of policy initiatives to a halt.

What happened? When I heard that the freeze was causing the shutdown of state Medicaid portals, I knew Trump would have to back down within a couple of days. You start messing with people’s health care, and you create political firestorms pretty damn fast.

Medicaid is the health coverage for 20% of Americans, and pays for more than 50% of the people in nursing homes. Even the most cold hearted Republican Governors don’t want to see news coverage of Grandma being dumped on the side of the road. MAGA Republicans think no one cares about Medicaid because it only covers poor people, but it covers not only elderly and disabled people in nursing homes, but also a lot of those working class folks who were part of Trump’s base.

Democrats need to learn this key lesson: health care is Donald Trump’s achilles heel. People notice immediately when their health care coverage, services, prescription drugs, or long-term care goes away. And voters know that Democrats want to preserve people’s health care, while Republicans are more willing to mess with it.

Health care is the one economic issue that voters have more confidence in Democrats than Republicans. Democrats were fools not to emphasize the health care issue more in last year’s election, but the good news is that the issue is really important to people, and they will notice if Trump and the Republicans in Congress try to deny or mess up their coverage. Unfortunately for the Republicans, the only remote hope they have for serious budget savings run straight through the health care line items in the federal budget: Medicare, Medicaid, and the Veterans Administration.

I couldn’t agree more with Dan Pfeiffer when he wrote about passive Democratic messaging:

Look, I want Democrats to be better messengers, but if there is one lesson from the Trump era, it’s this: when it comes to messaging, volume and frequency are vastly more important than precision.

Saying nothing is worse than saying the wrong thing.

But I will also say this: we can’t go wrong attacking Trump and the Republicans on health care. Democrats should look at what happened on the budget freeze cave-in, and understand that our first line of defense and our best line of attack is on health care.