Making a success of failure

After more than seven years of promising to repeal and replace Obamacare, the Republicans last week couldn’t find enough votes in the House of Representatives they control to pass a watered down version of what they had promised to do. That’s the good news. Obamacare will remain in place. Millions will not be deprived of coverage that meets minimal standards and provides reasonable benefits. The taxes required to sustain the system, which are collected from the very wealthy, will remain in place, at least for now, as will the Medicaid expansion.

The bad news is that President Trump and the Congressional Republicans will now heap opprobrium on Obamacare and hinder its effectiveness, in order to prove that it still needs to be repealed and replaced rather than fixed and expanded. It’s failing, they say, so let’s discourage companies from offering the health insurance it made available to many millions of people. And let’s kick as many people off Medicaid, the state-based system that provides health care to poor, as possible. The worse it gets, the better.

Trump has made a lifetime “success” of failure. Look at what we know of his tax returns, which admittedly isn’t much. But it is enough to know that he used losses over many years to offset his income to pay far less tax than would otherwise be required. A lot less in percentage terms than people making a small fraction of his income.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is a technique that can be used in foreign policy as well. Islamic extremism is our greatest threat, Trump says, so let’s go after it with the full force of the US military, neglecting any efforts to make extremism a less attractive proposition and intensifying military attacks, with predictable consequences for collateral damage. The result is predictable after 16 years of already aggressive military efforts: there will be more radical Islamic extremists in more countries four years from now than there are today, just as there are more than four years ago. Failure will become its own reward, justifying yet another ratcheting up of the military effort.

But you don’t have to wait. You can see this happening today with Yemen, where Trump is contemplating more support for a war that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already demonstrated to be fruitless. Up the ante, as in Vietnam.

So what will stop this pattern of building on failure? Only a solid and definitive “no” from the American people. The resistance to repealing Obamacare was a good rehearsal, but far more is needed. Trump is still telling more lies than anyone can keep track of with a scorecard, which the Washington Post is helpfully maintaining. He is also sending more troops to Iraq and Syria, without revealing their numbers. Without a stronger civilian effort to shore up decent civilian governance they are destined to become part of Trump’s consistent record of building his personal success on other people’s failures. Unless we all stop that from happening this time around.