The AHCA vote has been delayed.
538 has an article on Trump's options as far as this goes, and none of them look great:
Trump could fold. This would involve making some public declaration that the Republicans needed to go back to the drawing board on health care or move on to other priorities. While this might allow Trump to save some face, it would nevertheless be a costly play. He’d concede defeat on one of his signature priorities, his reputation as a dealmaker would take a hit, and The House Freedom Caucus would feel as though they had a notch in their belt. It would be embarrassing — and if the past is any guide, Trump wouldn’t handle his embarrassment very well.
Trump could raise, going “all-in” on the bill and doing everything he could to secure passage. This would probably involve making further compromises with the House Freedom Caucus — pushing the bill further to the right and perhaps making it even less popular — and then threatening moderate Republican who dared to defect from the bill. It just might work to get the bill across the finish line in the House. Then again, it might not, and Trump would have wasted more political capital without getting anywhere. Or the bill could pass the House and then die in the Senate, putting House Republicans in a position where they’d taken a roll call vote on an extremely unpopular bill and had nothing to show for it. Or perhaps the bill eventually would pass the Senate and become law, only for Republicans to discover that the public wasn’t bluffing when they told pollsters that they hated the bill, hurting Trump’s approval rating and costing Republicans dozens of seats at the midterms. Republicans might face another round of political backlash, furthermore, once millions of Americans discovered they were no longer able to afford their health insurance or their policies didn’t cover as much as they used to.
Finally, Trump could call — which would mean distancing himself from the bill without a clear plan for what came next. He wouldn’t officially declare the Republicans’ health care efforts dead; in fact, he and Press Secretary Sean Spicer would stubbornly resist the “FAKE NEWS” narrative that the bill had failed. But he’d largely stop lobbying Republicans on behalf of the bill, instead telling House Speaker Paul Ryan to figure things out for himself. The risks here are obvious enough. Trump — who remains popular with rank-and-file GOP voters and members of Congress — is the best salesmen Republicans have. Without his working on its behalf, the GOP bill would probably become even more unpopular. But Ryan might not have an exit strategy and relations between the White House and Capitol Hill could fray. The whole process could play out for months, exerting a continuous drag on Trump’s popularity, as the Democrats’ health care bill did to President Obama.
More at the link:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tr ... alth-care/Trump wants the House to
vote on it tomorrow, and if it fails, he's just going to move on, leaving the ACA in place until he can rack up some needed wins on other fronts (tax reform, infrastructure, the wall etc). It looks like he's going to do what Nate Silver would do - fold - which would, as the article suggests, be an uncharacteristic move for him to make. Whether he'll make good on that, I don't know, he seems to go back on a lot of what he says.
He's going to take a hit no matter what, though.
Oh, and 538 has a
Trump Approval Tracker, in case you were wondering how he's polling.