Fifteen minutes later — after a presidential tangent on the theory that the Obama administration spied on him — Trump got around to mentioning the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “It’s a catastrophic situation, and there’s nothing to compare anything to because Obamacare won’t be around for a year or two,” he said. “It’s gone. So it’s not like, oh, gee, they have this. Obamacare is gone.”

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The president’s haphazard sales pitch for repeal does not often sync up with Republicans’ messaging from Congress — not in the details, or the value of “coverage” vs. “access to coverage.” It does match up on the idea that the ACA is a crisis, possibly designed to fail. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) has called repeal “an act of mercy,” to stop the “death spiral” of the ACA. In a Wednesday night interview on Fox News, Trump repeated a pet theory that the ACA was intended to collapse in 2017, as soon as Barack Obama left office. (The theory is complicated by Obama’s work to elect Hillary Clinton, not Trump, as his successor.)

That messaging jars with Trump’s (and Republicans’) portrayal of an American economy that’s humming along — and with the mixed, not disastrous, record of the law. The CBO report that teed up the Republicans’ fight over the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the party’s Obamacare successor, also foresaw at least 10 more years of life in the ACA. Insurers have pulled out of rural markets — the favorite talking point of Republicans has become how many counties now have only one insurance option in the ACA exchange. But insurance analysts have predicted continued profitability for the industry, not a “death spiral.”

“There are none of the classic hallmarks of a ‘death spiral’ in the exchanges,” Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who helped craft the law, said in an email. “Most consumers are subsidized, so higher prices will not chase them out of the exchanges. And the rapid price increase last year was a one-time adjustment to make up for initial underpricing — indeed, 2017 premiums were almost exactly where CBO predicted them to be in 2010!”

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The growing economy has proven to be more of a complication for the “disaster” push. Since the ACA’s passage, the job market has steadily improved, preventing the ACA’s opponents from saying that the law stopped growth. The argument has been, instead, that growth would have been faster without the ACA’s mandates, and that — more resonantly — some small businesses have declined to hire full-time employees out of fear of the employer mandate.

Another argument, which Trump has largely stopped making, is that the ACA has hurt the economy by encouraging people to leave the workforce. In 2014, Republicans (including Trump) said that a CBO report seeing a long-term work rate drop, equal to around 2.5 million jobs, was proof of the law’s devastation. But as then-CBO director Doug Elmendorf told Congress, the reductions came from the slow end of “job lock,” the phenomenon of people feeling as though they had to keep working or else they’d lose insurance.

“If someone comes to you and says I’ve decided to retire, or I’ve decided to stay home and spend more time with my family, or I’ve decided to spend more time doing my hobby — they don’t feel bad about it, they feel good about it,” Elmendorf said. “And we don’t sympathize, we say congratulations. And we don’t say they’ve lost their job, we say they’ve chosen to leave their job.”

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Without a jobs crisis, the implementation problems of the ACA, and the rising cost of premiums, have shaped the Republicans’ response to it. To the increasing frustration of conservatives who seek a full repeal, Republicans this year began framing their mission as not just “repeal and replace” but “rescue and reform.” That frame was endorsed by the GOP message guru Frank Luntz at the party’s policy retreat. But in an email, he said he worried that the party was losing the appeal of the message.

“Obamacare promised to lower health-care costs,” said Luntz. “It didn’t. It promised to make health care easier and simpler to access. It didn’t. They promised you could keep your doctor, your hospital, and your health-care plan. It didn’t. This is a simple case to make, yet they aren’t making it. From a communication standpoint, they should be focused on the problem instead of fighting over the solution. You’re asking people without college degrees to understand policy that even the experts can’t comprehend. Stop! It’s about the health-care options we want, the personal control we need and the quality we deserve.”

The Republican sales pitch — that a crisis lurks under the rosy-seeming economy, and a complicated plan must be passed to provide greater opportunity and choice — bears more than a few similarities to the 2005 push for Social Security reform. For much of that year, a reelected President George W. Bush stumped around the country, warning that the Social Security system would be running a deficit in most Americans’ lifetime, and that Congress needed to add personal accounts to the system to stave off disaster.

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The result was a political debacle, one that plenty of Democrats took to heart. Matthew Stoller, a Democratic writer and strategist who worked for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), was one of the “Net roots” activists who created a campaign called “There is no crisis,” to discourage any Democrats — then rattled by their defeat — to make a deal with Bush.

“We were playing a blocking action against elites with the ‘There is no crisis’ frame,” recalled Stoller. “The messaging on Social Security for the ‘they are greedy geezers’ elites is that we can’t afford Social Security, that it’s in crisis. This was a way to disguise what they wanted, which was to shift Social Security money to Wall Street. We were just trying to get Democrats to say no, that’s false, and unmask what was going on as a straight up cut to Social Security.”