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It is an established fact that Donald Trump will never accept responsibility for anything. His first reaction is to delegitimize the source and when that fails, to throw any handy supporter under the bus. We have seen it happen time and again.

Paul Krugman has issued a warning to Congressional Republicans that their turn is coming up next, as their health care reform bill, the American Health Care Act, or AHCA, looks to be selected for early extinction:

Prediction: if GOP health bill goes down in flames, Trump will deny that he ever supported it and place all blame on Congressional Rs. — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 7, 2017

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That’s right. Krugman’s warning will likely go unheeded, but Trump will brush Paul Ryan and company off his shoulder like so much unwanted lint should this thing go south.

And Krugman tried to put their danger in terms they could understand, by appealing to the example of Trump U:

If you deal with him, you WILL be left holding the bag when things go wrong, which they usually do. Rs getting a course from Trump U. — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 7, 2017

Oh how that would hurt if R’s weren’t so obsessed with finally obtaining the holy grail of their party, the “conservative agenda.” Terrifyingly, as Krugman says, throughout these first weeks of the Trump Experiment the numbers of Republicans who trust Trump over the media has climbed from 78 to 86 percent.

You can lead a horse to water, and if he’s a Republican, you can make him drink it too. And gulp it down they do. What’s remarkable is that this whole imbroglio has revealed a GOP that, as The Plum Line‘s Greg Sargent points out, displays a shocking level of “policy illiteracy.”

They are doing it to themselves. The GOP health care plan is a profound failure, a catastrophe of epic proportions.

They have had eight years to think about replacing Obamacare and this is what they came up with: what appears to be a desultory weekend of meandering thought at Paul Ryan’s desk.

All the more shocking for, as Krugman points out,

Remember, Paul Ryan is a deep thinker and wonkish policy expert. All the serious people said so. — Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) March 7, 2017

Well, yes. Remember, Paul Ryan excels at making people think talking about something and attaching to it fancy slogans is the same thing as actually doing something, just as Donald Trump has made an art form of evading responsibility for his actions.

If this is the best the GOP can do when victory is within grasp, they deserve to lose, and they deserve to be crushed under the wheels of both history and Trump’s bus.

Which will be more painful, only they can tell us.