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Many left-lib­er­als are cur­rently cel­eb­rat­ing the col­lapse of the Re­pub­lic­ans’ pro­posed health­care bill, which would have “re­pealed and re­placed” Obama­care. There is good reas­on to cel­eb­rate, of course: the AHCA would have likely been even more dis­astrous than the ACA has proved to be. But some pun­dits seem to think that this, along with the on­go­ing Rus­sia in­vest­ig­a­tion, will be enough to sink Trump’s pres­id­ency. Fi­nally, they say, after months of scan­dal and dip­lo­mat­ic faux pas, the or­ange men­ace will be laid to rest. Re­id Kane Kot­las spells out why this isn’t ne­ces­sar­ily the case:

Don­ald Trump did not lose; he got ex­actly what he wanted. He let the Re­pub­lic­an es­tab­lish­ment dis­cred­it them­selves. Re­peal­ing Obama­care was not Trump’s is­sue; it’s been a Tea Party hobby­horse since the bill first passed in 2010. They couldn’t even re­peal it with a sol­id Re­pub­lic­an Con­gress, which just demon­strates the depth of di­vi­sion with­in the party. Con­gres­sion­al GOP lead­er­ship now look bad in the eyes of their own sup­port­ers, which strengthens Trump’s lead­er­ship role in the party.

Trump is only in of­fice be­cause he’s been ex­ploit­ing and ex­acer­bat­ing that di­vi­sion since he first an­nounced his can­did­acy. Mean­while, as the ACA gets worse and worse, it just re­flects neg­at­ively on the Demo­crats who passed it in the first place. So Trump won. If you don’t get that, you don’t get polit­ics.

All this should be fairly ob­vi­ous to any­one not caught up in the 24-hour news cycle, with its con­stant bar­rage of bull­shit re­port­age. What happened with health­care is that Trump handed the House Re­pub­lic­ans an un­ex­ploded gren­ade with the pin already re­moved. He let them in­de­cis­ively juggle it around be­fore blow­ing them­selves up. Now if Trump wants to move in an­oth­er dir­ec­tion, even a drastic­ally dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tion — something like, say, uni­ver­sal single-pay­er health­care or medi­care for all — he can hon­estly say to Paul Ry­an and the rest of the GOP, “You had your chance.”

Corey Robin, humbled in his polit­ic­al pre­dic­tions ever since Trump won the elec­tion, hoped “that the rage of the GOP would over­whelm its reas­on.” Trump did him one bet­ter: he banked on it, while trolling the Pro-Life Free­dom Caucus with mid­night ul­ti­mata pos­ted on Twit­ter. In all like­li­hood, Trump prob­ably wouldn’t mind if the Re­pub­lic­ans got mauled in the midterm elec­tions. Es­pe­cially some of the Tea Party hol­d­overs, be­cause he’d be bet­ter able to pass ac­tu­al health­care re­form and in­fra­struc­ture spend­ing with Dems man­ning the le­gis­lat­ive branch.

For the mo­ment, however, his only vis­ible in­tern­al op­pos­i­tion has been totally un­der­cut. Some have gone so far as to sug­gest that it’s not even use­ful to think of Trump and his in­ner circle as Re­pub­lic­ans. Rather, they rep­res­ent a het­ero­gen­eous fac­tion with­in a party they’re seek­ing to des­troy and re­cre­ate. After all, Trump was re­gistered as a Demo­crat between 2001 and 2008, and stated for the re­cord that he was “very pro-choice” in a live in­ter­view from Oc­to­ber 1999. His Re­pub­lic­an op­pon­ents dur­ing the primar­ies wer­en’t wrong when they ac­cused him of re­peatedly prais­ing the Scot­tish and Ca­na­dian mod­els of so­cial­ized health­care.

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