HARTLAND, MICHIGAN—“A humiliating defeat,” the Associated Press story said. “Dealmaker fails to seal the deal,” read the headline in Herald Bulletin of Anderson, Indiana. “Trump’s presidency perilously off course,” declared the Wyoming Tribune Eagle, of all places.

“I think he’s doing a great job,” said Everett Pitts, 45. “I think he’s trying.”

Pitts, a quality assurance worker in the Ohio village of Columbus Grove, believes Obamacare has done “nothing but hurt the people.” But he does not believe Donald Trump is responsible in the slightest for his inability to fulfill his campaign promise to get rid of it.

“I don’t see how anybody could be mad at Trump for trying to fix it,” he said. “It’s all about Congress. I think that Congress is just trying to fight everything that he does even though he’s trying to do right by the people, for the first time in years. The first time in years that we have a president that really cares.”

In theory, Trump’s dramatic Friday failure hurts his image in all sorts of ways. A man who promised to “immediately” repeal the Affordable Care Act did not repeal it at all. A man who vowed to steamroll Washington was steamrolled by Washington. A man who portrayed himself as the world’s best negotiator was unable to cut a deal even with members of his own party.

In practice, most of the people who voted for him are not inclined to lay blame at his feet.

They stood with him as he mocked a man with a disability and insulted the family of a dead soldier. They were not wavering in the slightest, or seeing him in any new light, over a trifling legislative defeat.

Interviews in three Trump-friendly counties in Michigan and Ohio on Sunday revealed a smattering of disappointment in the president. Some Trump voters on Medicaid, the government insurance program he had threatened to cut, said they were newly concerned about him.

But the real culprits, in the minds of most of his base, were everyone other than him, more or less.

If anyone should be embarrassed, his supporters declared, it was obstinate House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and her Democratic Party.

And the disloyal group of right-wing Republicans called the House Freedom Caucus.

And the Republican leaders in Congress, like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who vowed for seven years to “repeal and replace” Obamacare without ever coming up with an actual plan.

If Trump did anything wrong, said Republican voter Tom Schumm, it was that he “didn’t judge properly the incompetence he was dealing with” from the “numbnuts” in his own party.

“The Republicans have, as usual, bumbled the whole issue. They seem to, when they get in charge, spend so much time fighting among themselves that they don’t get anyhing done,” Schumm, 67, who sells Mason jars online from his Ohio home. “For seven years, they voted all these repeal-and-replace laws; it was easy for them then. Now they’re in charge, when it means something, and they say, ‘Aw, well, we can’t do that.’ Wait a minute: You said you could.”

As failure loomed, Trump’s team began to heap blame on Ryan, long a favourite punching bag of chief strategist Steve Bannon. After their American Health Care Act was withdrawn, though, Trump settled on a target that seemed curious: the Democrats, who do not control either the House or the Senate.

His supporters immediately jumped on board. The messaging tactic played to the immense public loathing of Congress, which is far less popular than the unpopular president.

“It was the Democrats not willing to be with them,” said Shawn Reed, 48, a factory worker in Findlay, Ohio, near Toledo.

“It doesn’t matter what he says, the Dems are going to disagree,” said Joe Braidic, 56, a teacher in the Ohio village of Pandora. “Instead of Congress working for what’s best for us common people, nothing ever gets accomplished.”

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Trump tried a different message in a tweet on Sunday morning: “Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!”

A central feature of Trump’s campaign rhetoric was his pledge to achieve sweeping change immediately through sheer force of personality and talent. Obamacare repeal, he said, would be “so easy.” But his supporters were not holding him to his grandiosity. Instead, they professed optimism about his elaborate supposed Plan B: allow Obamacare to collapse on its own, then return to the table as Democrats beg him for help.

“Everybody wants this thing changed right now, and that’s not how it works,” said Brian Salamin, 60, a maintenance technician in the small Michigan township of Pittsford.

“He’s smart in the sense that he’s going to let Obamacare implode. People are going to be so fed up with it they’re just going to say ‘to hell with you people.’ And then they’ll get something passed.”

Even if the demise of Trump’s bill angers some voters, there are benefits to its death: The failure protects Trump from the wrath of voters he would have harmed.

Independent analysts said the bill would have resulted in the loss of insurance for millions of people and it would have disproportionately hit lower-income older people in rural areas, a large part of Trump’s base.

The people least inclined to give Trump a pass over the bill were recipients of Medicaid, the program for low-income people. Trump’s plan would have amounted to a 25-per-cent Medicaid cut over time.

George Conrad, a former oil field worker now disabled and impoverished, voted for Trump because he thought opponent Hillary Clinton would try to take away his 40 guns. When he learned of Trump’s health plan, he began to re-evaluate the president.

“We’ll have to wait and see. I think Trump blew a lot of smoke before he was elected to get elected,” Conrad, 57, said at a clinic in Zanesville, Ohio, earlier in the week. If Trump were to cut Medicaid, he said, “I wouldn’t vote for him again. It has an astounding effect on my livelihood and my two kids.”

But even some of the Medicaid recipients Trump alarmed were willing to cut him slack. Former Ohio school bus driver Jonalee Evans, a 51-year old who is now disabled, voted for Trump to end elite corruption.

She was not willing to believe he would knowingly betray someone like her.

“I think he’s just being misinformed about a lot of this,” she said two days before the bill failed. “I really do. Once I think he finds more out about what all the Medicaid takes care of for people that are low-income, in poverty, he won’t touch it.”

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