Donald Trump Is the Worlds Most Inept Hostage-Taker
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services told the New York Times it intended to continue making “cost-sharing reduction” payments, which compensate insurance companies that cover low-income customers in the exchanges established by Obamacare. Eliminating the payments — which cost the government about $7 billion a year — would make premiums spike by about one-fifth, or cause insurers to get out altogether. House Republicans sued to stop the payments during Obama’s presidency, as part of their totalistic campaign to destroy the law. Now, faced with the prospect that such a destruction would unfold on the GOP’s watch, the Trump administration was indicating it would let the payments continue. “The precedent is that while the lawsuit is being litigated, the cost-sharing subsidies will be funded. It would be fair for you to report that there has been no policy change in the current administration,” Health and Human Services wrote the Times.
The next day, however, HHS rescinded its statement. In its place, it issued a communiqué which differed from the old one not only in substance, but in style: The updated HHS position rejected the payments and expressed its reasoning using the crass, zero-sum logic and pidgin-English, populist diction favored by the president himself. “We have not been contacted by Democrats to help save Obamacare, perhaps because they consider Obamacare to be a losing cause. Democrats need to help solve this failed Obamacare plan,” explained an HHS spokesperson. It read as if the bureaucracy of a modern, industrialized government had been captured by hackers communicating via Google Translate.
And indeed, it soon emerged that Trump had personally dictated the new statement in a fit of anger. As he subsequently revealed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he plans to use the payments as ransom to compel the Democrats to agree to his terms. “Obamacare is dead next month if it doesn’t get that money,” Trump told the Journal. “I haven’t made my viewpoint clear yet. I don’t want people to get hurt … What I think should happen and will happen is the Democrats will start calling me and negotiating.”
So, now — assuming that Trump understands what he is saying and will stick to it, which can never be assured about any stance he takes — Washington has settled in for a hostage standoff. Such episodes have become familiar in American politics. In a normal political negotiation, the two sides disagree about what policies are helpful or harmful. In a hostage-style negotiation, on the other hand, the two sides agree that a particular policy is harmful, and one side threatens to allow it, out of the belief that it can exploit the other side’s greater concern for the public welfare, in order to extort unilateral concessions. In recent years, as the Republican Party has radicalized, it has grown increasingly prone to hostage-style bargaining. Trump’s own obsession with dominance makes him especially attracted to hostage-taking. (Recall his refusal during the primary to commit to endorsing the party nominee, explaining that he needed to use the threat of hurting the party as “leverage.”)
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