The Republicans had a field day with their cynical and opportunistic attacks on the ACA during the Obama Administration. Knowing perfectly well that their plan, to the extent they had one, was to cut costs by making insurance on the exchanges less valuable and less affordable, they exploited complaints from the public that the deductibles and co-pays were too high. Once in power, they wrote legislation that made no sense except as a redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich. It turned into a fiasco.
If you think that was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until we have another financial crisis.
Obama won the 2008 election largely because the electorate correctly perceived that tax cuts for the wealthy and deregulation, the GOP’s perennial favorite option, were not a viable solution to the crash. The GOP responded by creating a bizarro alternative narrative of the crash in which financial institutions were blameless, and the government was at fault by doing too much to encourage poor people to buy homes. Consistent with that (and their own interests), the Republicans want to get rid of Dodd-Frank and unleash the banks again, while all the while insisting that there must be no more bailouts.
If we have another crisis, the survival instincts of the self-styled “King of Debt” will probably send him in the correct direction, but his party is another matter. The GOP, on the whole, is the party of gold bugs, high interest rates, and no bailouts. Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon are their role models, not FDR and Obama. How could Trump get a new version of TARP through the system?
It will be a complete nightmare.