Trump, GOP Lose Big

There’s no other way to put it: Donald Trump and the GOP suffered a disastrous loss Friday when their horribly thought-out healthcare plan dropped dead.

Remember, Trump campaigned for president on a platform of fear and loathing: fear of immigrants and loathing of Obamacare.

And recall that Republican congressional candidates have campaigned for years on a platform of hating Obamacare and promising its demise.

And don’t forget that in the past, Republicans in the House voted, time and again, to repeal Obamacare — knowing full well that President Obama would veto each and every repeal bill.

So now — with Trump in the White House and with Republicans controlling Congress, they’ve all shown themselves to be incapable of actually governing.

In their desperate effort to get rid of Obama’s health plan, the GOP and Trump failed to craft an alternative that proved palatable to all factions of the Republican Party.

The party’s crazy extreme right wing wanted the poor — who cannot afford healthcare without assistance — to simply go away and, if necessary, die. That was unacceptable for the party’s moderates, and the two sides were never going to get together.

And since Democrats were never going to provide any votes, it was up to Trump and the GOP to generate an intra-party compromise.

It never happened, and now Trump and his party have utterly failed to deliver on their signature campaign promise.

Will they pay a political price? Of course, and everyone but Fox News groupies and those fanatical right-wing radio talk-show hosts know it.

What Trump and the GOP should have learned today is that governing — actually making things happen — is a whole lot more difficult than those Fox blow-hards and radio screechers make it out to be.

Governing means creating coalitions, listening to all the stakeholders and crafting compromises.

Did the president and his party learn that lesson? My guess is — nah. They’ll just keep listening to the blow-hards and the screechers.

And doing that will lead to outcomes quite similar to Friday’s — disastrous defeats, with no one to blame but themselves.