Here’s my latest hobby: looking at just how many constituents House Republicans, especially the so called “moderates,” want to strip of their health care coverage. Congressional Republicans are currently in hard negotiations and a game of chicken for how to pay for their big tax cut, which seems to be getting bigger by the day. They want to pay for it by taking away people’s health care coverage. But just how that gets done is the key. As Nicole Lafond pointed out this week, moderate House Republicans are saying they may not be willing to support $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid. But they might be willing to cut one of the major provisions of Obamacare, the so-called Medicaid expansion system, which pays 90% of the cost for states to substantially expand their Medicaid coverage to more people. This is a big part of how Obamacare dramatically reduced the number of people without coverage. It’s not just about the exchanges and the subsidies.

A newly released AJC poll shows support for Donald Trump falling to 43% in Georgia; disapproval 55%.

According to Punchbowl, Sen. Ron Johnson just announced he won’t support the reconciliation bill being written by House Republicans. He says there have to be $5 trillion in cuts to get his vote. And forget about the July 4th deadline. For perspective, the House Freedom Caucus was demanding either $1.5 or $2 trillion.

This is part of what we mean when we say that public opinion matters. If Trump were at 55% support or even 50% there is zero chance Johnson would be doing this. But they see him as currently weak and on the rocks. So someone like Johnson is happy to say, “You’re weak. So I’ll come forward and inflate my cred with hard right-wingers at your expense.”

I’ve gotten a range of responses to yesterday’s post (“Trump’s Already Lost“) on Trump’s gambit and whether he’s already lost. There were a few specific questions, however, that came up again and again, that I wanted to answer.

There are a number of you who simply don’t agree with me about the role of public opinion in the battle against Trumpism, which I sketched out in yesterday’s Backchannel and in other posts over recent months. And that’s great. Because, among other reasons, you keep me on my toes. And TPM isn’t a community that has any one point of view, in any case. But I note this because I have to again whack this same hornets nest today. So apologies in advance, probably mostly to myself. But this time it’s not with an argument, not some proposition I want to convince you of. It’s more a personal interpretation, my perception of events.

Quite simply, I think Trump’s already lost.

Amazon quickly scraps idea of listing costs from tariffs on product listings after White House attacks the idea.