Sarah Huckabee Sanders told Fox News viewers that the reason "great dealmaker" Donald Trump won’t come up with a replacement for Obamacare until after the election, even as he’s working to completely destroy it now, is because of the meanie Democrats. There was no challenge from anchor Sandra Smith.

Trump has been in office more than two years, his party controlled the House of Representatives and the Senate for most of that time, yet he has been unable to come up with the “so much better” alternative to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) he promised on the campaign trail. And now that his Department of Justice is trying to get the entire Affordable Care Act thrown out in court, Trump has decided he’ll wait until after the election to replace it.

As Slate noted, this is a concession to Congressional Republicans who openly revolted and made it clear they would not be writing any legislation in the foreseeable future. That’s not surprising, given that the issue was a big loser for them in the 2018 midterm elections. But it’s also a concession to the fact that Republicans can’t or won’t come up with a health care plan that’s popular. Otherwise, you know they’d be frothing at the mouth with enthusiasm, demanding Democrats pass it and attacking them if they didn’t.

But Smith, who was clearly skeptical of Trump’s health care “strategy,” didn’t mention any of those inconvenient but obvious truths. Instead, she asked Huckabee Sanders, “What is the president’s goal on healthcare right now?”

Sanders was too busy blaming Democrats for all of Trump’s potentially catastrophic ineptitude to articulate anything like a specific plan for the future of health care:

SANDERS: Certainly, the president wants to be the party of health care. It’s an important issue and it’s one that he wants to see us address. He’d love to be able to address it now. But we know that Democrats are controlled by the far, radical left-wing of their party and they are a total contrast to what we need and what the president wants to see happen when it comes to health care. They want to see this Medicare-for-all, government takeover of healthcare. And the president wants to see healthcare returned to the power of the patient. He wants the people that are receiving the care to get to make decisions about it. They want the individuals to control their own decisions about their healthcare while the radical left want the government to tell you what you can and can’t do. What doctor you can and can’t see and what procedures you can and can’t have. That’s unacceptable to this president. It should be unacceptable to every single American.

FACT CHECK: Democrats are working on a plan to strengthen Obamacare, not demanding Medicare for all or nothing.

Smith did not correct Sanders misrepresentations, nor did she say anything to clue in viewers to the fact that the situation represents an epic fail on the part of the Trump administration. But after Sanders claimed that Trump will do “what we can administratively” on health care before the election, Smith was again clearly skeptical. And Sanders again blamed the Trump administration failures on Democrats.

SMITH: How does President Trump respond to concerns shared within his own party about this move and about making an election a referendum on Obamacare without something solidly there to replace it?

SANDERS: I don’t think that the election has to be a referendum on Obamacare. It needs to be a discussion about what works on health care. And that’s what the president’s doing. He’s laying out the things that we need to see in a good health care system - whether that’s more quality care, whether that’s more affordable choices. And that’s bringing those costs down. Again, the president wants to lay out those principles. He’s been a hard-core advocate on protecting pre-existing conditions, you’ll continue to see him talk about that. But we know that Democrats aren’t serious about getting anything done. They want to play games. They want to attack the president. They want to play investigator instead of legislate tour. And they need to decide what they were elected to do. And so far, We’ve seen over the last hundred days that’s very little.

Watch Sanders and Smith tacitly acknowledge that Trump doesn't have what it takes to make a deal below, from the April 2, 2019 America’s Newsroom.

Republished with permission from Newshounds.us