Coulter, Breitbart, Drudge torch health care bill backed by Trump
With the vote on the American Health Care Act looming, conservative media personalities and outlets that were backers of President Trump throughout the campaign are attacking the Obamacare replacement bill the White House supports.
Ann Coulter, right-wing provocateur and an avid supporter of the Trump campaign, has been attacking the bill as “Obamacare Lite” since its text became public, hammering House Speaker Paul Ryan along the way. “Could some investigative reporter write a piece explaining why Ryan is so hellbent on this deeply unpopular healthcare bill?” she wrote earlier this week, before criticizing Trump and Ryan for making tax cuts next on their legislative agenda instead of trade and immigration.
Could some investigative reporter write a piece explaining why Ryan is so hellbent on this deeply unpopular healthcare bill?
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 22, 2017
Only way @realDonaldTrump can fulfill his promises on healthcare is to sign a law saying:"There shall be a free market in health insurance."
— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) March 16, 2017
Despite her support, Coulter has been critical of Trump in the past, but the critique became more pointed this week in an interview with Sean Hannity:
“This is beginning to look like every other Republican administration: massive spending on the military, which wastes $125 billion a year, according to a McKinsey report. He’s moving money from one swamp to another. We don’t want war; we want more jobs, a wall and lots of deportations, not all of this stuff that is indistinguishable from the Jeb Bush administration.”
Matt Drudge, who had mostly stayed out of the AHCA fray, turned the banner of his website against Ryan on Friday morning. The line Drudge chose echoes a 2010 Nancy Pelosi quote, in which the then-House speaker said of the Affordable Care Act, “we have to pass the [health care] bill so that you can find out what’s in it,” a quote that was played often on Fox News and defended by Pelosi.
Breitbart News — formerly headed by Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon — has also been hammering the bill, which the right-wing site dubbed “Ryancare.” On Friday, it promoted a New York magazine story stating that Bannon had expressed concerns over the fact the bill was “written by the insurance industry.” The site has also been hammering Ryan, including releasing audio of the speaker during the 2016 campaign saying he wouldn’t support Trump and publishing so many stories criticizing Ryan and the bill that its journalists were scolded by the conservative National Review.
Earlier this month the conservative outlet Newsmax published a story urging the president to abandon the Freedom Caucus and work on a bipartisan plan to pass a “Medicaid for All” bill. Christopher Ruddy, the founder of the site and a longtime Trump friend, wrote the piece.
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