Transcript: MTG Humiliates Trump over Reiner as MAGA Crackup Worsens

Shephard: Yeah, I mean, I think that the sort of top-line thing, the diagnosis is totally right. It’s just, how do you fix it? There’s nobody worse who can talk about the economy right now than Donald Trump, who said that affordability is a made-up conspiracy by the Democrats.

Part of the issue, I think, though, is that it gets at a problem that Republicans have had since 2016, which is that the party is Trump. Like, they need him to motivate voters who only come out for him. But they also need him to articulate whatever it is that they’re supposed to be doing, because otherwise they don’t really have anything. He sort of has this sort of veto power over the entire policy program of the party, including, like, if the government should be open and functioning or not.

And I think with the subsidies, you’re seeing this sort of run into another long-standing issue, right? Which is that it’s not like the Affordable Care Act is new. It’s been around for 15 years now, more than 15 years. And for the entirety of that time, Republicans have been arguing that it is destructive and that they will have a better health care policy.

But they don’t have a better health care policy, and they kind of can’t have one, because any policy that would get their approval would be even more unpopular than what they’re doing right now. So I think that what we’re seeing too is they’re running into this buzzsaw, which is that they keep complaining about the ACA and saying that they’re going to have a better idea, but their idea would be worse than the existing system. So instead, they’re just kind of letting the existing system collapse because they’re worried about taking any kind of ownership over it.