Ky. Sen. joins Trump for golf, health care chat
The outing to Trump National Golf Club came hours after Trump tweeted that talks on replacing the law have been going on and “will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.”
He added that anyone who thinks the effort is dead “does not know the love and strength in R Party!”
White House spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said Trump would be golfing and talking policy, including health care, with Paul and budget director Mick Mulvaney.
Paul came out strongly against the House GOP legislation, and its collapse humiliated Trump.
Trump and aides had argued for a vote in the final hours of negotiations around the bill, but Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan ultimately agreed to pull it. In an interview with the Financial Times published online Sunday, Trump said the bill was pulled because “I didn’t want to take a vote. It was my idea.”
Still, Trump said, “I promised the people great health care. We are going to have great health care in this country. Now, it will be in one form or another. It will be a repeal and replace of Obamacare which is the deal that is being negotiated now.”
Since the bill went down, Trump has repeatedly lashed out at members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus who contributed to the defeat.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, a member of the caucus, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, said “the facts remain the same. When you look at the document, when you look at the legislation, it doesn’t repeal Obamacare.”
Trump told the Financial Times that “if we don’t get what we want, we will make a deal with the Democrats and we will have in my opinion not as good a form of health care, but we are going to have a very good form of health care and it will be a bipartisan form of health care.”