When a politician says he has “concepts of a plan” instead of a plan, there is no plan.
And yet, that’s where we are with Donald Trump, nine years after he first launched a political campaign promising to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better, nearly four years after he had four years to try to do just that. And fail. 
Doubling down during Tuesday’s debate, he claimed he had “concepts of a plan” to replace Obamacare. Really? He’s got nothing. In fact, he sounds just like Nixon sounded in 1968, when he claimed he had a “secret” plan to get us out of Vietnam. That turned out to be no plan at all (remember “Vietnamization?”) and cost us seven more years there and tens of thousands of lives.
The Affordable Care Act, about which I wrote plenty in this blog a decade or more ago, wasn’t perfect. But it was a whole lot better than what we had before it – and anything (save a public option) that has been proposed since. Back then, insurers could deny coverage because of pre-existing conditions and could skip mental health coverage entirely, and there was essentially no insurance market for individuals and small businesses. And insurance costs were out of control.
We could have done better, it’s true. But we could have done a lot worse, too.
Because Trump likes to complain about problems without offering any real solutions.
This week, for example, Trump complained again about border security after single-handedly having killed a bipartisan border protection bill that had the support of, well, pretty much everyone else.
And this is eight years after he promised that Mexico would build us the most beautiful border wall ever. That never happened.
He’s not a problem solver. He wasn’t before, and he won’t be tomorrow or ever.
And every time he rails about immigrants eating our dogs and cats or scapegoats people from “insane asylums” and “mental institutions” invading our borders and threatening our safety, I am reminded that my son Tim died of a fentanyl overdose on pretty much the day Donald Trump left office – fentanyl that probably crossed the border on Donald Trump’s watch.
That bipartisan border bill had provisions to save other young people who self-medicate with drugs laced with foreign fentanyl. But Donald Trump doesn’t care. He would rather see them die and run on the headline than offer up a real plan to secure their safety.
And go around barking about dog-eating immigrants, the “late, great Hannibal Lector,” and God knows what else comes into his head.
I usually pull some punches in any political conversations I have these days, because I value others, and the opinions and feelings they have. Because so many of us of all ideologies just want to make our cities, states, and nation better.
But I don’t feel that way about Trump. He is a poser who doesn’t care about any of us.
He is responsible for the death of my son and others like him. He didn’t inject the needle, but he didn’t cut off the drug supply either.
He is responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from COVID-19 because he had no plan to deal with a pandemic when it arrived on our shores.
He is responsible for the deaths of law enforcement officers because of the violence he incited on January 6th. (His excuse on Tuesday – all he did was show up and give a speech. That’s partially true; he did nothing to stop the riot afterwards.)
He is responsible for the deaths of school kids and others because for four years he had no plan to deal with gun safety or gun violence.
He is and will be responsible for the post-Roe morbidity and mortality of women and babies who can’t access pregnancy care because he had no plan to protect them (other than to “leave it to the states”).
As Trump says, he’s not the one who fired all these weapons. I understand that. He just placed the targets. And that’s enough for me.
Eventually, almost all our political choices come down to one question – with whom will I and the people I care most about be better off?
Reasonable people can come to different conclusions about that. When Trump goes into the voting booth, you can be sure that he puts his interests first. And when I go into the voting booth this year, you can count on the fact that I’ll do the same.
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