Former President Obama and President Trump (Chip Somodevilla and Alex Brandon, Associated Press)

With the expiration date of subsidies for ObamaCare recipients rapidly approaching and health care premiums already skyrocketing, President Trump and his Republican allies are again scrambling to figure out what to do about the Affordable Care Act. It is not clear they will do anything — or even can do anything — to fix what is clearly a big problem.

The ACA is driving Trump batty. For as long as he has been on the political scene, he has been trying to confine it to the dustbin of history. Those efforts have revealed the emptiness of his populist commitment to improve the lives of ordinary Americans. They also show that he will say or do anything to bury the legacy of Barack Obama, a predecessor whom he despises.

In 2017, CNN put it this way: “The key to understanding Trump’s motivations here are entirely contained in the ACA’s shorthand nickname: ObamaCare. It’s named after the man — former President Barack Obama (duh) — who shepherded it into existence. And that’s exactly why Trump wants to get rid of it.”

That’s why one of the centerpieces of his 2016 campaign was his promise to “repeal and replace ObamaCare.” At a Florida rally in February 2016, Trump proclaimed, “It’s going to be gone. We’re going to come up with a great health care plan.”

Nearly a decade later, America is still waiting.

Trump’s latest salvo in this campaign against the ACA came on Nov. 26, when he said that what he called the “unaffordable care act” had been “a disaster.” Trump said this even as a plan to extend enhanced subsidies for the ACA for two years leaked to the press.

Earlier in November, he posted the following message. “I am recommending to Senate Republicans that the Hundreds of Billions of Dollars currently being sent to money sucking Insurance Companies in order to save the bad Healthcare provided by ObamaCare, BE SENT DIRECTLY TO THE PEOPLE SO THAT THEY CAN PURCHASE THEIR OWN, MUCH BETTER, HEALTHCARE, and have money left over.”

“In other words,” he continued, “take from the Big, Bad Insurance companies, give it to the people, and terminate, per Dollar spent, the worst health care in the World, ObamaCare.”

That proposal, like almost everything the president has ever said about the ACA, is quite strange. Giving people money so that they can buy their own health insurance would mean that the cost they would pay would skyrocket. And ultimately, it would end up where? In the pockets of “Big Bad Insurance Companies.”

This plan, however, would not be in the best interest of the American people. Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, labeled Trump’s proposal “a very bad idea,” noting that it would only “redirect taxpayer funds to other parts of the health care industry.”

But it is also another of one of Trump’s vanity projects: He wants to replace ObamaCare with direct payments that carry his own name instead.

That would be a repeat of what happened in 2020 when Trump had his name put on millions of stimulus checks that Americans received during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time, The Washington Post noted that the decision was “unprecedented … the first time a president’s name appears on an IRS disbursement.”

Today, while the 24 million Americans on ObamaCare face the bleak prospect of paying much more for their coverage or foregoing it altogether, the president wants his supporters to know that he has not forgotten his promise to be the anti-Obama.

As CNN put it eight years ago, “Every move Obama had made since winning in 2008 was not just wrong to Trump’s mind, but — and this is super-important — un-American. … Trump also grasped early on that the symbolic center of Obama-ism — the thing that conservatives hated most — was ObamaCare.”

Making America great again requires burying the vision of the kind of democratic community that Obama offered. That’s why, no matter what he does about ACA subsidies, Trump can neither shake his obsession with ObamaCare nor refrain from showing how much he hates it.

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

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