As Republican leaders abruptly postponed a vote planned for Friday afternoon on the House bill to repeal and replace Obamacare, President Donald Trump dialed up a Washington Post reporter to share the breaking news.
“We just pulled it,” Trump told the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, who was tweeting about the conversation while he was still on the phone with the President.
President Trump just called me. Still on phone.
“We just pulled it,” he tells me.— Robert Costa (@costareports) March 24, 2017
“I don’t blame Paul,” Trump tells me
— Robert Costa (@costareports) March 24, 2017
Trump has repeatedly railed against news outlets like the Washington Post, whose coverage of his presidency he views as unfair. In February, he criticized the paper’s report about National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with Russian officials, calling the paper “fake news” and suggesting that it made up its anonymous sources.
That view didn’t stop Trump from phoning one of the paper’s top political reporters as soon as he and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) agreed to cancel a vote on the bill.
Trump also called the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman to discuss the decision to pull the bill. He indicated to Haberman that he is done working on health care policy for the time being, and The Washington Post’s Costa also told MSNBC that Trump told him a repeal bill would not come up again in the near future.
Trump told the Times that Republicans would work on a deal in a year when Obamacare “explodes.” He said that he did not blame Ryan for the bill’s failure this week, but “maintained that he was merely going along with the House bill,” per the paper.
This post has been updated.
