Less than 48 hours after urging Senate Republicans to restart the process with a "clean slate"—which translates loosely to "I'm not mad, and actually find public humiliation funny"—Donald Trump met for lunch today with all 52 of his GOP colleagues in a last-ditch effort to save the Senate's health care reform bill. As Majority Leader and noted embarrassing failure Mitch McConnell sat silently and tried to make himself disappear, Trump delivered a grim, rambling pep talk that alternated between scolding the assembled legislators for their failure and encouraging them not give up. "I have pen in hand. Believe me, I'm sitting in that office, I have pen in hand," he said, as if their failure to comprehend his ability to manipulate his physical environment were somehow the only thing holding them back.

Ominously asserting that the Affordable Care Act's insurance marketplace, which independent financial analysts have found to be stabilizing rapidly, is "gone" and "failed" and "not going to be around" for much longer, Trump repeatedly proclaimed, without evidence, that Republicans are "close" and "very close" to getting a bill done. The president also pointedly seated Nevada senator and Trumpcare holdout Dean Heller, who has already been the subject of attack ads financed by pro-Trump groups, directly to his right. At one point, Trump gestured to Heller and asked the room, "He wants to remain a senator, doesn't he?"—because as we all know, when a vulnerable blue-state politician takes a stand against party leadership in an effort to keep his job, publicly threatening him is the best way to convince him to change his mind.

Next, despite being a member of a political party that controls the House, the Senate, and the presidency, Donald Trump blamed the Republicans' seven-years-and-counting failure to come up with an improvement to the Affordable Care Act on Democrats, using vaguely Michael Scott-esque language that suggests that he is very excited to have recently learned a new word, but also still isn't quite sure how to use it.

We have no Democrat help. They’re obstructionists. That’s all they’re good at is obstruction. They have no ideas.

(Number of Democratic senators invited to the White House lunch today: zero.)

The president's message was so inspiring that as soon as the event ended, McConnell glumly told reporters that the Senate's vote on an already-dead Hail Mary plan to repeal the ACA without a replacement would proceed as scheduled next week, presumably because McConnell's spirit can take no more Ls, and because he's been doing lots of Internet research on whether someone can enter the Witness Protection Program voluntarily, and is pretty sure he's found a way to do it.

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