If Donald Trump said it, then it must be false. That seems to be the philosophy of many liberals, including Politico senior staff writer Michael Grunwald. In this case, Trump correctly described Jonathan Gruber as the architect of ObamaCare in a speech today in Des Moines, Iowa. Gruber was once embraced by liberals and was praised by them many times over and over and over again as the "architect of Obamacare."
However, ever since November 2014 when video revealed Gruber as stating that lack of transparency is a huge political advantage in promoting ObamaCare and mocking the "stupidity" of the voters, he has become a big liability for them and now they must deny many times more than thrice what they once enthusiastically embraced.
Here is Trump's uncomfortable reminder today that the disgraced Gruber was indeed the architect of Obamacare:
By the way, remember when Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, said the ‘lack of transparency,’ was essential to passing the legislation and then he talked about – and I quote – ‘the stupidity of the American voter.’ This is the hateful attitude of insiders like Mr. Gruber and Hillary Clinton – and the voters have had enough. They’re taking their country back.
That caused Grunwald to tweet this silly assertion:
Trump is going after Jonathan Gruber, "the architect of Obamacare." (He wasn't.)
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) September 13, 2016
Grunwald is far from alone in making this easily disproven assertion. His Politico colleague, Paige Winfield Cunningham, attempted the same shtick shortly after release of the Gruber video in November 2014:
Democrats are miffed that Gruber has portrayed himself as the “architect” of Obamacare. If he had stuck with being among the legion of policy and technical experts who played a role in the massive legislation, his insulting words wouldn’t have been so combustible.
A quick check revealed that Ms Cunningham herself described Gruber that same way a few months earlier in July of that year:
One of Obamacare’s chief architects, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber, just handed conservatives a gotcha moment.
It wasn't only Cunningham at Politico who described Gruber as the architect of Obamacare. Some of her and Grunwald's Politico colleagues used the same description of Gruber including Reid Pillifant in November 2011:
Jonathan Gruber, a key intellectual architect of President Obama's overhaul of the American health care system, is a little frustrated.
Ryan Lizza at the New Yorker also described Gruber the same way in October 2013:
While President Obama was in Boston on Wednesday to deliver a speech at Faneuil Hall, he was also scheduled to attend a private meeting with friends and supporters. One of the well-wishers in attendance was Jonathan Gruber, an M.I.T. economist and an architect of both Mitt Romney’s health-care plan in Massachusetts and Obama’s Affordable Care Act.
Oh, and let's not forget Politifact in October 2012:
Another study, written for the liberal organization FamiliesUSA, also concluded that Romney’s plan for Medicaid would end up pushing people out of the program. To estimate how many, author Jonathan Gruber, who was an architect of both Romney’s health plan in Massachusetts and of Obamacare, said he assumed in the study that states would find a way to absorb 25 percent of the cuts (by becoming more efficient, cutting down on overhead, etc.) but that the rest would have to be made up by tightening eligibility and dropping Medicaid recipients.
This is only a very small sampling of a plethora of liberal descriptions (until November 2014) of Jonathan Gruber as the architect of ObamaCare (he was). Grunwald's big problem is that he gets annoyed when uncomfortably reminded of this by Trump..
