While President Donald Trump’s first major legislative push hurtled toward a major defeat, one of his top advisers, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was photographed with his wife, Ivanka Trump, on a ski gondola in Aspen.

Kushner may not have been the lead White House negotiator on the doomed healthcare bill. But the image of Trump’s top consigliere hitting the slopes at perhaps the most critical moment of his young presidency sent a message loud and clear: The White House wanted a win, but health care was not the dominant priority for Trump that it was for the Republican members of Congress who actually had to take a vote.


"Their heart was not in the healthcare battle,” said a top Republican who was in meetings with the president and his team but declined to be identified because those conversations were supposed to be private. “Think about the level of intensity on the executive orders for the travel ban, or on the wiretapping claims. He certainly checked the boxes on healthcare, to his credit. But it's self-evident there was not a certain level of intensity devoted to this."

White House officials have insisted that Trump understood that a legislative victory was crucial at this stage of his administration -- he is struggling to boost a 42.2 percent approval rating according to FiveThirtyEight.com , the lowest of his presidency so far -- and that he was lending the full force of his office to the cause.

"The president and vice president left everything on the field," press secretary Sean Spicer wrote in an email on Saturday. "They were making calls and having members to the White House all week. In total, we spoke or met with over 120 members of Congress." And Kushner, other White House officials insisted, was never deeply involved in health care to begin with.

But according to Republican Hill staffers, in the weeks leading up to the doomed vote, Trump’s mind seemed to be elsewhere.

The president made it clear at rallies over the past few weeks that healthcare was just something he needed to get through, in order to move on to the next thing. "We want a very big tax cut, but cannot do that until we keep our promise to repeal and replace the disaster known as 'Obamacare,'" he told an adoring crowd at a rally in Louisville last week.

The president also has been distracted in recent weeks by other issues, like questions about possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, and the evidence-free accusation that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

The top Republican said that in one healthcare meeting with the president and his top aides in the Oval Office, it was a challenge to keep Trump focused on the health care vote. "Halfway through that meeting, he stopped to talk about Gorsuch,” the source said. “His mind was bouncing around. I never felt they were dialed into this."

Trump gamely climbed to the Hill this week, making a last-minute, full-throttle push for the bill in the final hours -- even devoting his news-driving Twitter feed, uncharacteristically, to the health care fight.

But on the Hill, the president’s effort was viewed by Republican operatives as a case of too little, too late. The impression Trump left there, according to multiple sources who did not want to criticize the president on the record, was that Trump didn’t know that much -- or care that much -- about healthcare policy That made it hard for him to go tit for tat with members of the Freedom Caucus and get into the weeds on details of the bill. “There were other distractions they were dealing with,” said one top Republican staffer on the Hill.

And after just 64 days in office, the short-attention span president told the New York Times on Friday he was just happy to finally to move on. “It’s enough already,” he said of the healthcare talks.

Republicans trying to understand what went wrong on Saturday also pointed to the fact that the two lead negotiators on Trump’s team, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, were slowed down by delayed confirmations. Price was only confirmed on Feb. 10, and Mulvaney was confirmed a week later, which prevented them from being totally devoted to the health care cause.

The approach of Trump, who sold himself on the campaign trail as a master negotiator who promised that repealing and replacing Obamacare would be “so easy,” stands in stark contrast to how his predecessor worked to get the Affordable Care Act passed seven years ago. Former aides to Obama said he devoted the better part of a year working on his healthcare bill, with staffers devoted full-time to its passage.

“Obama's commitment to health reform was passionate and unstinting,” said his former top political adviser David Axelrod. “He was moved by people he had met who were working hard and needed care. He had seen his own mother dealing with cancer and grappling with insurance in her final months.”

Trump’s predecessor in the Oval Office was “steeped in the details of the law and what needed to be done to pass it,” Axelrod added. “There were many times along the way that it appeared as if all paths were blocked and the bill would fail, and he simply would not let it die.”

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Trump defenders pushed back on the notion that the replacement bill failed because the White House didn’t care enough. “The problem with the bill was the bill,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview on Saturday. He also shrugged off Kushner’s ill-timed vacation, and the optics problem of the president’s top adviser, who reportedly thought supporting the bill was a mistake, hitting the slopes.

“This is going to be a long eight years, people need to pace themselves,” Gingrich said. “This was not a crisis. This was a very important project, which Jared probably thought was under control when he left. The loss of confidence is only three or four days old.”

For his part, the president put on a happy face in public and appeared unfazed. On Friday, answering questions from reporters gathered in the Oval Office, he spun the stunning defeat as a victory. "Perhaps the best thing that could happen is what happened today," Trump said. "It will go very smoothly."

On Saturday, he wrote on Twitter: “ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!” before heading to the links at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.