US President-elect Donald Trump gives a thumbs up sign as he walks with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. Joshua Roberts/Reuters "Can you believe that Mitch McConnell, who has screamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years, couldn’t get it done," asked President Donald Trump, on Twitter, of the Senate majority leader.

He’s not wrong.

Republicans promised over and over, for years, that they would repeal and replace Obamacare if elected. Republican congressional leaders, including McConnell, chose a strategy of pursuing repeal and replacement through the budget reconciliation process. They said they could get repeal done in weeks.

So, if Trump had "excessive expectations," as McConnell said on Monday, who set those expectations?

Of course, Trump should have been smart enough to know that Republicans in Congress were lying, and they had no plan at all to replace Obamacare.

But Trump is not smart. Republicans had a messaging strategy aimed at low-information voters. They needed to adjust for the fact that they made a low-information voter president.

Plus, if Trump had non-excessive expectations, what should he have done instead? Developed a healthcare plan that 50 Republicans in the Senate would have liked, that would have complied with the rules of budget reconciliation, and that would have been popular?

That would have been an impossible task even for a Republican with solid grounding in healthcare policy, let alone for one who thinks a"“risk corridor" is a place where you can grab women by the p----.

Trump is a fraud. But the Republican healthcare fraud long predates him, and he deserves only a small fraction of the blame for the fact that Republicans have made healthcare promises they can’t keep.