On Saturday, a day after the Obamacare replacement bill went up in flames, President Trump dropped this cryptic message on Twitter:
That’s it. No clue as to what the topic would be, just a directive to watch.
But viewers didn’t have to wait long for the answer. At the open of her show, she ripped apart the Speaker of the House. “Paul Ryan needs to step down as speaker of the house,” she said. “The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his healthcare bill, the one trumpeted to repeal and replace Obamacare, the one that he had seven years to work on, the one he had under lock and key in the basement of Congress, the one that had to be pulled to prevent the embarrassment of not having enough votes to pass.”
She had no patience for Ryan’s claims that opposition was unexpectedly stronger than they’d envisioned. “How could you possibly misjudge this?” she spat.
Pirro said the blame is Ryan’s, not Trump’s. “I want to be clear, this is not on President Trump. No one expected a businessman to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process. How would he know which individuals upon which he would be able to rely?”
And she said she wasn’t delivering a message for Trump, who said after the bill was pulled that he continued to have confidence in Ryan. “I certainly have not spoken to the president about any of this, but I can only imagine that [Trump] and his aides took on healthcare because they believed you had his back, and you didn’t! They didn’t even test the waters.”
Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, who is a longtime ally of Ryan’s, said on Fox News on Sunday that the timing of Trump’s tweet was merely “coincidental,” although he also said he hadn’t talked to the president about it.
But The New York Times wrote Sunday that “Trump has a long history with Ms. Pirro.”
During the worst weekend of the Trump campaign, when Mr. Trump was under siege over an 11-year-old outtake from “Access Hollywood,” he told aides that he would do an interview with Ms. Pirro to defend himself, according to a person with direct knowledge of the conversation. He was dissuaded by aides who told him it would not be viewed as credible by voters.In their phone call on Saturday, according to a person briefed on the matter, Mr. Ryan told Mr. Trump that he wanted to proceed with a tax overhaul package. Their relationship, so far, has seemed to hold.But privately, Mr. Trump has been pressed by some advisers to consider the damage wrought by the bill’s failure, and to consider Mr. Ryan’s role.Publicly, at least, Mr. Trump was casting blame on Sunday morning not on Mr. Ryan but on the small-government conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus, as well as outside conservative groups.
Still, Trump doesn’t like to be disappointed by his employees – that’s why his catch phrase is “You’re Fired!” And right away, rumors started to circulate that someone’s head will be lopped off for the embarrassing debacle.
