I didn’t watch the debate the other night, but I sure heard about it, and even I had to get in on the meme fun the next day:
Apparently when asked for specifics of his plan for American healthcare once the Affordable Care Act is repealed under his next Presidency, our 45th President said, “I have the concepts of a plan.”
Which, for anyone who has ever paid more than eight seconds of attention to this guy, obviously means, “I have given it zero thought and I have no intention of doing so in the future.” And all the meme-making and joking to mock this obvious bullshit line was fun, but I think it points out another aspect of the news media’s coverage of this campaign that I find incredibly frustrating, even above the fact that they are insisting on treating this campaign and its two candidates as business-as-usual, and ignoring the utter insanity of a party nominating a former President who tried to engineer to a coup to stay in power and who has promised to pretty much follow every authoritarian instinct in his bones. The error here is in treating 45 as if he’s just a mere candidate for the Presidency, instead of treating him as what he is: a former President who served a full term and has a very real record that might just be instructive, if we looked at it once in a while.
Take the healthcare question: “Do you have a plan?” was the question. But that shouldn’t have been the question! He was President already! The question shouldn’t be “What is the plan?” but rather, “You already had four years and no plan was ever proposed. Why should we believe that you have a plan now?” And it would be true. During 45’s first term, at no point did he offer up any proposal or legislative agenda even pointing at a healthcare plan. He never made a single policy suggestion about it. So why on Earth should anybody be giving him any benefit of the doubt here that he’s going to come up with a plan this time?
He has already shown us who he is, so why is our media insisting on treating him as if he’s something totally new?
The best statement about this came, I think, from President Biden, who noted in his speech to the Democratic National Convention that 45 kept promising “Infrastructure Week”, and yet, in Biden’s words, “He never built a damned thing.”
That should be the response every time he says what he wants to do in the second term: “Why didn’t you do that in the first?” When he says we’re not going to have deficits, ask why he exploded them in the first term. When he says we’re going to have great healthcare, ask him why he didn’t touch healthcare in the first term. The man was already President, and his record of terrible policy, horrible court-packing, an economy managed solely for the rich, and eventually a bungled pandemic response and a disastrous economy exists. Let’s stop pretending that those are just things that happened, because the damned guy who made them happen wants another shot.
In a lot of the anti-Kamala memes I’ve read, the general point is that she’s had over 3.5 years to accomplish what she was touted. 1) She was VP and she was part of a team 2) As you note, the Orange as Prez for 4 years and did NOTHING about health care or a lot of other things except to kill Roe.