Trump Is Furious That Harris Remembers What He Said About Obamacare

Donald Trump is angry that Kamala Harris wants voters to take his threats against the Affordable Care Act seriously.
On Thursday, the vice president and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee suggested during a press conference in Wisconsin that Trump would try to repeal the 2010 health care law, on which tens of millions now rely for insurance. Her Republican rival responded with a post on his Truth Social platform.
“Lyin’ Kamala is giving a News Conference now, saying that I want to end the Affordable Care Act,” Trump wrote. “I never mentioned doing that, never even thought about such a thing.”
But less than two months ago, during a presidential debate with Harris, Trump answered a question about the law, also known as Obamacare, by saying it was “lousy health care. … If we come up with something, and we are working on things, we’re going to do it and we’re going to replace it.”
“I have concepts of a plan,” he added during a follow-up exchange. “I’m not president right now. But if we come up with something, I would only change it if we come up with something that’s better and less expensive. And there are concepts and options we have to do that. And you’ll be hearing about it in the not-too-distant future.”
One reason Trump got the debate question was a series of previous posts on Truth Social musing about the law’s fate, going back to one last fall in which he wrote that “The cost of Obamacare is out of control, plus, it’s not good Healthcare. I’m seriously looking at alternatives.”
In that same post, he said Republicans “should never give up” on trying to repeal and replace it.
A few days later, Trump posted that “I don’t want to terminate Obamacare, I want to REPLACE IT with MUCH BETTER HEALTHCARE. Obamacare Sucks!!!” He also said that, if elected, he would seek to produce “much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people.”
More recently, Trump’s 2024 running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), has talked about Republicans pursuing a “deregulatory” agenda on health care.
And just this week, as first reported by NBC News, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told an audience that “health care reform’s going to be a big part of the agenda” if Republicans are in power next year.
Johnson went on to answer a question about the Affordable Care Act by saying, “No Obamacare,” although the meaning of that particular statement was difficult to pin down given the context.
The recent rhetoric has distinct echoes of what Trump said as a 2016 presidential candidate and then after his election, when he would make promises like “everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”
Trump never produced a plan in line with this vow. Instead, the Republican proposals he backed and tried to get through Congress would have weakened or eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s rules for insurance coverage while dramatically reducing spending on government-provided or government-financed coverage.
As a result, the number of Americans without insurance would likely have spiked.
That prospect proved to be highly unpopular. It was a big reason why Trump couldn’t convince enough GOP lawmakers to support repeal, and why Republicans took heavy losses in the 2018 midterm elections.
The memory of those losses still lingers in the minds of many Republican leaders, enough that they might think twice before trying a full repeal again, even if they emerge from this year’s elections with control of both the White House and Congress.
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But GOP leaders have long said that the Affordable Care Act is bad policy on the merits, arguing that its mix of regulation, spending and taxes distorts insurance markets and hurts the economy.
Republicans also need spending reductions to offset the proposed tax cuts they are intent on passing. An obvious source would be the money going into the Affordable Care Act, especially the portion going to expansions of Medicaid, the government-financed program for low-income Americans.
And Republicans could always pursue a more piecemeal approach to weakening the law, whether by rewriting key regulations or changing component parts through legislation.
Of course, even such partial efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act might alarm a majority of Americans. That is why Harris is trying so hard to make sure voters remember what Trump has said, and Trump is trying hard to make them forget.