Trump tried to burn down Obamacare. He set his hair on fire instead | Ross Barkan

Burning Obamacare to the ground was always a House Republican obsession that Trump, in the heat of the campaign, took up to spite the president while tossing a little red meat to Republicans. “Repeal and replace” is alliterative, after all: it sounds nice enough on an arena stage. It’s just hard to pull off in the real world, as Donald Trump found out on Friday.

Blessed with total control of government, Republicans can only think of how best to burn the house down – and they’re not even doing a good job at that. The House speaker, Paul Ryan, unjustly heralded as a policy wonk, tried to rush his healthcare bill to the floor for a vote on Thursday, only to find the moderates and extremists in his party rebelling. On Friday, Donald Trump was forced to pull the bill, due to lack of support from his own party.

It was a humiliating defeat, which he tried to blame – unbelievably – on the Democrats.

Paul Ryan on failed healthcare bill: ‘This is a disappointing day’

Ryan’s Trumpcare was a horrendous concoction and should disabuse fawning congressional reporters of the notion that the speaker is a man of deep intellect and self-reflection. Had the bill not fallen flat on its face this Friday, it would have had little chance of passing the Senate.

What remains is the fact that Donald Trump couldn’t close the deal. He is hoping everyone blames Ryan, and Trump is lucky that his supporters might do just that. The diehards, inhabiting his post-factual universe, will simply write Ryan off as a loser – they hated him anyway – and hail their king for the bounties he’s still promising.

But healthcare will ultimately be Donald Trump’s problem. That’s how our politics work. So far, the president has been more fatuous than fascistic, though he belatedly realized what an albatross the bill had become. His negotiating powers, whatever they ever were, failed.

Were Trump the deal-making genius his ego tricked himself into believing he was, he would never have taken up this healthcare venture. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that only 17% of Americans approved of Trumpcare. Trump’s poorest and least educated supporters had much to lose and nothing to gain from the legislation.

That’s why demolishing Obamacare never made sense. After all, Trump, via Steve Bannon, promised economic nationalism, a robust spending plan for those who he believed deserved it most: the white and native born. Trump wasn’t going to lose any votes by focusing on immigration and infrastructure spending at the expense of Obamacare, which rank-and-file conservatives resent less now that Obama himself has been removed from the equation.

President ‘pulled out every stop’ to pass healthcare bill, Spicer says

Far from upholding the most basic protections for the working-class, the Trump administration has, instead, evolved into one of the most rightwing in recent memory. It is stocked with the kind of appointees (Mick Mulvaney, Tom Price) who could have been plucked from Congress by Presidents Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

This is the difference between Trump and someone like the French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, the Front National leader who identifies closely with the billionaire. Le Pen’s fiscal platform is unapologetically leftist, rejecting the austerity measures embraced by Europe’s financial class.

Trump rages with all the hate of Le Pen and none of the savvy. Blaming Ryan for Trumpcare’s failure will not absolve him of trying to do a very stupid thing. If he chooses to weaken healthcare in other ways – to somehow prove Obama left the country with a self-destructing system – he’ll still be the president when premiums skyrocket as insurers struggle to adapt to this instability.

In 2018, 2019, and 2020, screaming Obama’s name won’t matter anymore. The country will just know President Trump and the damage being done.

Trump tried to burn down Obamacare. He set his hair on fire instead | Ross Barkan

If Trump were a clever populist, he"d demand universal healthcare for America | Ross Barkan

Donald Trump understood the average Republican voter well enough to disregard the party’s tired orthodoxies and still win the presidency. He figured out that most Republicans could care less about shredding entitlements and adhering blindly to Milton Friedman’s soulless economic agenda, as long as he was bashing immigrants. To this day, Trump still won’t fulfill Paul Ryan’s Ayn Randian fever dream of gutting Social Security and Medicare.

But he does promise to do Ryan’s bidding and repeal Obamacare, a move that is all but guaranteed, if successful, to make a lot more people who voted for him sick. This probably doesn’t worry Trump too much in the short term, since senior citizens in the West Virginian hollows and dead factory towns of Ohio can’t afford dues at Mar-a-Lago anyway. Republicans in Congress, unused to and uninterested in governing, want to tear up Barack Obama’s signature achievement as quickly as possible because that will fill the emptiness of a nihilist campaign vow.

Few rational people think Ryan’s American Health Care Act is anything but a disaster-in-waiting. Swapping a mandate for ungenerous tax credits and eventually killing the Medicaid expansion while preserving the most expensive and popular aspects of Obamacare (not discriminating against people with preexisting conditions and letting everyone under 26 remain on their parents’ health plans), the AHCA will strip coverage from 24 million people by 2026, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office.

Were Trump a cannier tactician – or just a very different man – he would try to co-opt a beleaguered Democrat party by actually bolstering Obamacare, triangulating to save his party’s historic majority. Imagine if Trump’s team seriously considered the flaws of the ACA and tore a page from the playbook of the most populist Democrats to address them.

We already know there’s an overlap between the people who voted for Obama and Bernie Sanders and those who eventually chose Trump. The desperate working class of this country, white and black and brown alike, are seeking answers as automation and globalization threatens to sideline more and more laborers forever. Trump can gratify his own galactic ego and do some good by actually saving them.

As it stands, Trump’s obsession with pushing Ryan’s catastrophic bill is the best gift an otherwise pathetic Democratic Party could envision. Republicans control every branch of government, two-thirds of governorships and far more state legislatures than Democrats, a level of dominance unseen in more than a half century. But the sooner any version of the AHCA becomes law – no sure thing as Senate Republicans and moderates in the House balk – the more furious the backlash against the party of Trump will be.

Democrats are giddy that Republicans are on the verge of owning a healthcare catastrophe. Smarter Republicans are catching on. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, usually a reliable ideologue, recently said voting for Ryan’s bill would put the Republican’s formidable House majority at risk.

As unlikely as this scenario would be, the Trump White House could heed Cotton’s warnings and change course. Support increasing subsidies for the lower and middle class people who truly find Obamacare unaffordable. Expand Medicaid coverage. Try to entice younger, healthier people to buy insurance or just force them. Discover the unreliable New York liberal lurking somewhere in that tanned hulk and back a cheap public option to compete with private insurers, driving prices down.

Rebrand the effort. Obamacare can become Trumpcare, except Trumpcare will actually work for everyone. For all his business failures, Trump does know something about marketing and reinvention. What’s the best way to stick it to his bête noire, Obama, and punish Democrats for good? Make Obamacare (Trumpcare) better.

It’s easy to snicker about a Republican president doing this. But Trump owes his party little, and its orthodoxies even less. He is a cult of personality, a ringmaster who can command his legions of followers to the end of the Earth, no matter what he says or does. The working class white Americans and Midwestern swing voters who put him in power won’t punish him for making government more generous and welcoming.

Trump can choose the courageous and practical path of attempting to usher in an era of affordable, universal healthcare coverage to a nation in profound need of both. Or he can punish the American people and his own party with Ryan’s dreadful legislation.

Just don’t expect him to choose wisely.

If Trump were a clever populist, he"d demand universal healthcare for America | Ross Barkan