Donald Trump has checked with Donald Trump’s friends, and Donald Trump’s friends would like Donald Trump to know that things are going very well for Donald Trump’s friends. The investigation is complete, and you can stop mailing him your problems.
During his Sunday interview with Larry Kudlow on Fox News, the president explained that he knows people with private health insurance who love it. He described their coverage as affordable and great. This is how we assess a national healthcare system now. We ask a man whose social circle includes people who could purchase an MRI machine because it matches the guest bathroom.
“We have the best health care plans in the world,” Trump said. Then came the little qualification: “Now that doesn’t cover everybody, but it covers a lot of people.”
There it is. The presidential shrug, delivered directly into the gap where your healthcare should be. Imagine a fire chief announcing that the town has the finest fire department in the world, although it only responds to some houses. His friends’ houses, for example, have been beautifully extinguished. Several are less on fire than ever before. He can’t understand the hostility coming from the apartment building.
Trump investigating healthcare affordability by asking his friends is like investigating the housing crisis by asking whether anyone at Mar-a-Lago has a spare bedroom. Of course they do. One of them has a bedroom exclusively for the pillows that come off the other beds.
For people whose wealth doesn’t require an estate attorney, healthcare can involve a slightly different set of questions. Can you afford the premium? Can you afford to use the insurance after paying the premium? Is the doctor covered? Is the building covered? Did the anesthesiologist briefly enter from another dimension where your insurance company has no jurisdiction?
You can spend an afternoon trying to establish whether a procedure is covered and leave knowing less than when you started, except now you know the hold music has a bridge. But the president’s friends are pleased, so perhaps you should try being one of those. It’s an unusually exclusive healthcare proposal. Eligibility requires a pulse, a membership, and somebody who can get you seated near Donald.
Fortunately, we learned this same weekend that the president is capable of investigating a distressing personal experience in extraordinary detail. He has the concentration. He has the stamina. He can assemble evidence, reconstruct a timeline, and issue findings at a length that suggests somebody should have taken his phone away at dessert. Bill Maher made jokes about him after dinner.
In a roughly 1,300-word Truth Social post Sunday night, Trump unloaded on the comedian following their second White House dinner. He attacked Maher’s show, complained about the laughter, and disputed the duration of the meal. Maher’s account had apparently allowed dinner to expand beyond the president’s preferred borders.
“We have the timestamps,” Trump announced.
The timestamps. For dinner. Somewhere in the machinery of the executive branch, the question of when Bill Maher finished eating has achieved evidentiary status. You may be waiting for an insurance company to approve a scan, but please understand that the president is busy determining whether a comedian overreported his access to the bread.
He also wrote, “I never took it very personally,” which is a fascinating sentence to encounter inside approximately 1,300 words of taking it so personally that the grievance has developed plumbing.
Trump seems to approach dinner with a critic as though he is feeding a stray cat. Put out something nice, speak gently, and soon it will stop hissing and let you put a little Republican collar on it. Then Maher goes back on television and continues being Maher, and the president discovers, to his horror, that the salmon did not contain a nondisclosure agreement.
The complaint about Maher’s laughter is particularly revealing. Trump questioned whether the show uses a machine to produce it. Apparently, a room full of people finding him ridiculous requires a technological explanation. Somewhere, he imagines, a Democrat is turning a crank.
This is the same worldview operating in both stories. People he knows have good insurance, so the system is good. A man he entertained should appreciate the entertainment, so criticism afterward is an outrage. The country is assessed from his chair, and complaints become urgent when they reach his plate.
An American without coverage gets a passing qualification. An American with an HBO show gets a presidential dissertation. If your insurer rejects your claim, consider having Kid Rock introduce you to the president and then insulting the centerpiece. We have established that this gets a response.
The healthcare remark matters because the people outside his circle are the actual job. A president should be able to grasp that someone can work hard, pay for insurance, get sick, and still face a bill they can’t manage. Their experience counts even if they have never been photographed beside a gold curtain. The person doing the worrying deserves at least as much attention as the person doing the jokes.
Instead, he’s given us a healthcare assessment based on satisfied acquaintances and a dinner investigation with supporting timestamps. He can tell us how long he endured Bill Maher. He appears considerably less interested in how long the rest of us can endure this.
Perhaps we should send our medical bills to HBO. Apparently, that’s how you get this president to take a complaint seriously.
I would like to know if any of his friends would accept my current ACA (eviscerated by His Self) as anything approaching "health insurance." $20K deductible. The upside is no premium. The down side I had to use it a little this year and, funny thing, BCBS keeps denying pre-approved items.
i just love your satirical sense of humor and poking at the Rotten Pumpkin. it is a masterful presentation...thank you so much for keeping us sane...