Even the bill’s supposed strengths serve mostly to highlight Trump’s populist mirage. House Speaker Paul Ryan has boasted about the Congressional Budget Office’s finding that “American Health Care Act (AHCA) will lower premiums [and] improve access to quality, affordable care.” But the devil is in the details, and these details are indeed wicked. CBO concluded that overall premiums would fall in large part because older, poorer Americans who aren’t yet on Medicare would be priced out of insurance. Under the proposal, a 64-year-old making less than $30,000 would have to pay about $15,000 for insurance—or $13,000 more than under Obamacare. This is not a healthcare policy but an immiseration policy, in which the world’s largest economy would force older Americans to choose between their house and their insurance.

The Republican plan has not discovered a magic bullet to fix public insurance programs so much as it’s discovered that coverage is cheaper when insurance companies don’t have to suffer the inconvenience of actually insuring old, sick people. By cutting off insurance to the old, sick, rural, and poor, the AHCA seems to reserve its most severe punishment for the demographic that was core to Trump’s national support. If only the CBO could score for irony.

The future of the Republican healthcare bill will be an interesting test for Trump’s presidency and the president’s own priorities. It pits Trump between small government conservatives who just want to cut taxes and spending, other Republicans who are concerned about kicking 20 million Americans off coverage, and his own promises to protect the white working class. For now, the Republican Party is united around a semantic objective—to vilify and destroy a thing known as “Obamacare”—and deeply divided on just about every detail in a replacement.

This would seem to be the perfect opportunity for the negotiator-in-chief to fill the vacuum with his own priorities, so clearly elucidated on the campaign trail: more coverage, not less; Medicaid guarantees, rather than cuts. The White House could seize this opportunity to define a new kind of nationalist Republicanism. But if the GOP healthcare bill follows the trend set in the first seven weeks, Republicans will ultimately go forward with a predictable agenda, where lower taxes take precedence over any serious attempt to use the vast wealth of the U.S. economy to solve its most pressing problems.