Across the mainstream media, this morning’s press clips are brutal for Trump. ...But, but, but: That is not the vibe you get at all when you check out the right-wing sites where many of the president’s supporters consume their news. Many conservative outlets are pinning the blame on Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and moderate Republican senators, just as they blamed Speaker Paul Ryan when the health-care bill ran into speed bumps in the House.



“The GOP's Arrogance Was Thinking That 52 Votes Is A Majority,” by Forbes’ Stan Collender: “The GOP's numerical majority is not an ideological majority, and the collapse of the health care debate shows definitively that Senate (and probably House) Republicans are anything but ideologically aligned on major issues

- On his radio show yesterday, Rush Limbaugh launched a gendered attack against the three moderate senators who announced that they would not vote for full repeal of Obamacare: Susan Collins (Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska). “Now we find out the Republican caucus in the Senate is infected with essentially leftist members,” Limbaugh said on his program, which attracts millions of listeners each afternoon. “Collins, Murkowski, Capito – these three female leftists in the Republican caucus are running the Senate, not Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell is not running the Senate! These three women are running the Senate. The conservative Republicans in the Senate are not running the Senate. Three liberal women who call themselves Republicans are running the Senate!”
A favorable write-up of Limbaugh’s comments is getting played high on Breitbart.com this morning.

-- “Behind the scenes, White House officials were pointing fingers at Republican leadership,” Politico reports.

 With Obamacare intact (for now), the 10 million Americans who buy insurance on the ACA marketplaces still face lingering uncertainty. Amy Goldstein and Paige Winfield Cunningham report:

“Medicaid shows its political clout,” by Politico’s Rachana Pradhan: “Medicaid may be the next “third rail” in American politics. Resistance to cutting the health care program for the poor has emerged as a big stumbling block to Obamacare repeal, and Republicans touch it at their political peril.”

-- “GOP may not be punished if it can't pass repeal,” by the Kaiser Family Foundation’s Drew Altman: “When you look at the polling, the idea that the base will rise up and punish Republicans if they don't repeal the ACA appears to be exaggerated, and possibly even a political fiction.”

The president implored Republican senators to resurrect their collapsed negotiations. Sean Sullivan, Kelsey Snell and David Nakamura report: “Trump’s remarks, at a lunch with 49 Republican senators, prompted some of them to reopen the possibility of trying to vote on the sweeping legislation they abandoned earlier this week. But there was no new evidence that the bill could pass. At the lunch, the president also threatened electoral consequences for senators who oppose him, suggesting that Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) could lose his reelection bid next year if he does not back the effort. The president also invited conservative opposition against anyone else who stands in the way. … Trump’s remarks introduced a new level of chaos into the GOP, potentially setting up Senate Republicans to take the blame from angry conservatives for failing to fulfill a long-standing GOP vow …

The conventional wisdom on the Hill remains that, despite the venting session, they're still nowhere close to getting 50 GOP senators to vote for something.

-- Further complicating the effort, the Congressional Budget Office said last night that the amendment Mitch McConnell has pledged to bring up for a floor vote next week to fully repeal Obamacare would leave 32 million additional Americans uninsured if it got enacted. Amy Goldstein reports: “That would bring the total number of people without coverage to 59 million. The analysis also estimates that premiums for individual policies would rise by 25 percent next year if the number of people buying such policies plummets and concentrates sicker people in that insurance pool.