* Someone who is more knowledgable in historical minutia will have to tell me whether or not Congress has ever considered a piece of legislation that is more unpopular with the American public than the Republican health care plan. We got the results of several polls today. Here is the percentage of people in each one who approve of the legislation:
Quinnipiac: 16 percent
NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist: 17 percent
USA TODAY/Suffolk University: 12 percent
* In case you did’t know already, Trump obviously doesn’t care about protecting our elections.
As President Donald Trump lashes out at former President Barack Obama for failing to take a harder line against Russia for election meddling, Trump’s own advisers are struggling to convince him that Russia still poses a threat, according to multiple senior administration officials…
But the Trump administration has taken no public steps to punish Russia for its interference in the 2016 election. Multiple senior administration officials said there are few signs the President is devoting his time or attention to the ongoing election-related cyber threat from Russia.
* Abigail Tracy writes that, “Donald Trump’s Ignorance Is Becoming a National Crisis.”
Health-care policy, Donald Trump has admitted, is more complex than he once assumed. “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated,” he said in February as he struggled to cobble together a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. Still, he was optimistic about his chances. “Costs will come down, and I think the health care will go up very, very substantially,” he told insurance company executives, explaining that the current system was a “disaster” that would only get worse. “I think people are gonna like it a lot. We’ve taken the best of everything we can take.” In an interview in May, shortly after the House passed a bill that would cause an estimated 23 million people to drop or lose their insurance coverage, Trump boasted that he had become an expert on the subject. “It was just something that wasn’t high on my list,” he told Time magazine. “But in a short period of time I understood everything there was to know about health care.”
Nearly everything Trump has said, however, suggests that his understanding of the $3 trillion U.S. health-care sector remains dangerously limited.
Major news organizations are starting to document all the lies Trump tells. I’m thinking that someone should start documenting his ignorance by making a list of things he doesn’t know.
* Ryan Lizza says that, “The Entire Trump Agenda Is At a Tipping Point.”
The G.O.P. has adopted a major—even radical—agenda: transforming a massive sector of the economy, slashing taxes and rewriting the entire tax code, passing a budget that would dramatically reduce the size of government, and, in the middle of all of that, raising the debt limit. They have a plan to accomplish almost all of it before the end of the year, with minimal transparency, and without relying on a single Democratic vote. But if health-care reform goes down this summer, the rest of the plan may sink with it.
* You’ll never guess where Rep. Jason Chaffetz will land after he leaves Congress.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz is leaving Congress behind for a life in television, Fox News announced on Wednesday.
Chaffetz will be a contributor to the network starting July 1, the day after he will officially resign from Congress. The Utah Republican will “offer political analysis across FNC and FOX Business Network’s (FBN) daytime and primetime programming,” the network said in a statement.
* Finally, did you hear about that time back in 1990 when Mitch McConnell ran for re-election to the Senate on ensuring health care for everyone?
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