Trump in Transition (v14)

It's been a tough week for the president, don't you think?

President Trump, who famously told us "healthcare is an unbelievably complex subject, nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated."

Who knew?  We all knew it could be "so complicated" -- we've been hearing about it for seven years now, as of yesterday. It went all the way to the Supreme Court, for heaven's sake. Where was the president when all of that was going on?

Heck, the only thing that's not uncomplicated about it is all of the votes the Republicans took during the Obama administration to repeal it.

Who knew health care could be so complicated? Well, now he knows for sure.

We were very close, and it was a very, very tight margin.

Oh boy. The president probably lied again. According to many estimates I've seen, there were more than 30 Republicans who were going to vote against the American Healthcare Act, and that number was growing, not shrinking, as the day went on Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan needed all but maybe a dozen of their own party to pass the bill, so they probably missed by more than a "very, very tight" margin.

We had no Democrat support. We had no votes from the Democrats. They weren't going to give us a single vote, so it's a very difficult thing to do.

Yes, it is a very difficult thing to do, trying to pass something with little or no support from the opposition. It shouldn't be so hard, thought, when your party holds the White House and the House of Representatives and the Senate.

A lot of people don't realize how good our bill was because they were viewing phase one. But when you add phase two -- which was mostly the signings of Secretary Price...and you add phase three, which I think we would have gotten - it became a great bill. Premiums would have gone down and it would have been very stable, it would have been very strong. But that's OK. 

Governing is not like the business world, where a billionaire developer can get people to give him something, phase one of something, because the full package is so great, even though people often know that when a wheeler-dealer developer makes a promise for phase one, phase two, phase three, they'll be lucky if phase one even gets finished.

So what would be really good, with no Democrat support, is if the Democrats, when it explodes -- which it will soon -- if they got together with us and got a real healthcare bill. I would be totally up to do it. And I think that's going to happen. I think the loser are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, because now they own Obamacare.  They own it -- 100 percent own it.

And this is not a Republican healthcare, this is not anything but a Democrat healthcare. And they have Obamacare for a little while longer, until it ceases to exist, which it will at some point in the near future. And just remember this is not our bill, this is their bill.

Um, not sure how the American Health Care Act, the Paul Ryan Health Care Act, the one that Ryan said the president helped write, is the Pelosi-Schumer bill?

I want to thank the Republican Party. I want to thank Paul Ryan -- he worked very, very hard, I will tell you that. Tom Price and Mike Pence - who's right here, our Vice President, our great Vice President. Everybody worked hard. I worked as a team player and would have loved to have seen it passed.

But you're not going to pin this sucker on me, oh no you're not! This was Ryan's bill, I was just a team player, I was not the ringleader (Paul Ryan), I was not the guy who worked very, very hard (Paul Ryan), I would have loved to have seen it passed but I'm not the one who failed (Paul Ryan).

So I want to thank everybody for being here. It will go very smoothly, I really believe. I think this is something -- it certainly was an interesting period of time. We all learned a lot. We learned a lot about loyalty.

And we learned a lot about the people in my party, the Freedom Caucus, who are not loyal at all to me.

We learned a lot about the vote-getting process.

Because all this time, I thought the party whip was just a whip, and I don't think people know that's not the case. Did you know the whip was a person? Did you know Abraham Lincoln was a Republican? I don't think most people know that either, do you?

We learned a lot about some very arcane rules in, obviously, both the Senate and in the House. So it's been -- certainly for me, it's been a very interesting experience. But in the end, I think it's going to be an experience that leads to an even better healthcare plan.

So thank you all very much. And I'll see you soon.