Trump is settling into the background noise (as we can only hope), while the real players are in the Congress and the Cabinet. Trump may hold a triumphal self-promotion event in the Rose Garden to celebrate getting an Obamacare repeal bill through the House of Representatives, but that is only a stunt because a new bill will be crafted in the Senate that may look very different from the bill Speaker Ryan got through the House. Remember that Trump’s election was itself a fluke, not a trend, much less “a movement”, as he likes to put it. Journalists like to tie his election to Brexit, which had its distinct sources in the failures of the European Union, and to tie it to Marine Le Pen, but look what happened to her.

So we have to look elsewhere than to Trump to find out what is happening in government, and an insight into, at least, how politicians argue about health care policy was available yesterday at, among other places, George Stephanopoulos’ Sunday talk show on ABC. Politicians and journalists, first of all, when they talk about policy issues, by and large do not these days begin with axiomatic statements that they then apply to the particulars of Ryancare. They do not argue about whether people do or do not have a right to health care, even though, by the way, Ryan made it clear that if people don’t want insurance, they shouldn’t be forced to get it, and so people have no right of coverage, even if they do have a right of care, which means that they can always go to emergency rooms where the costs will be picked up by insurance companies and state governments. But Ryan does not too much refer to first principles because outright saying that healthcare is a luxury purchase rather than a right might make him seem hard hearted. So he prefers to appear as someone who is just making health insurance better.