President Trump cut himself a big slice of humble pie as he frantically called reporters from The New York Times and the Washington Post and pleaded with them to spin his lack of success in passing "Trumpcare" as something other than a personal failure for his presidency.

"Sure," Trump said. "I never said I was going to repeal and replace in the first 61 days" – contradicting his own statements and that of his own adviser, Kellyanne Conway, who told CNN in November that the then-president-elect was contemplating convening a special session on Inauguration Day to begin the process of repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Turning to an aide, Trump asked, "How many days is it now? Whatever." He laughed.

Trump laughs while the people suffer under Obamacare.  How funny.

"The beauty," Trump continued, "is that they own Obamacare. So when it explodes, they come to us, and we make one beautiful deal for the people."

Speaking of premium increases, Trump said: "When people get a 200 percent increase next year or a 100 percent or 70 percent, that's their fault."

So what President Trump is saying is that he is willing to continue with this disastrous centralized health care system with its skyrocketing premiums until it collapses of its own accord.  In the meantime, millions of people will find health care unaffordable.  This is leadership?  I call this cowardice.

What's even worse is the president's solution.  To ask the Democrats for help?  What kind of help does Trump expect Democrats to offer?  Democrats will offer help, all right, but it will be in the form of

a) higher taxes,

b) more subsidies,

and

c) more regulations.

But Trump maintains he will make "one beautiful deal" with Democrats.  Who talks like this about "beautiful deals"?  When Trump talks that way, he sounds like a used car salesman.

The fact is that the failure to pass this bill is owned by Paul Ryan and, yes, President Trump.  President Trump put his political capital into this bill, intensively lobbying for it, even threatening conservative members of Congress with primary challenges if they did not vote for the bill.  President Trump put his full weight of support behind a flawed bill that kept the worst parts of Obamacare intact.  And despite all this lobbying, the bill failed.

And it failed because enough Republicans realized that this was not a repeal of Obamacare, but a continuation of it, with its regulations, taxes, and subsidies.  But Trump didn't care about any of that; he just wanted a "beautiful deal," and now the president is going to look for love in all the wrong places, on the Democrat side of the aisle.

President Trump's extreme political naïveté is unfortunate for the nation.  I knew when he was running for president and promised to replace Obamacare with "something wonderful" we were in for a rough ride, because it was obvious he had no idea what he wanted to do.

I think others are realizing the same thing.  Even in such formerly stalwart places of support like the comments section on Breitbart, you can find many people shocked and surprised that Trump didn't even attempt to repeal Obamacare as he promised.  For Trump supporters, this is only the first of many such surprises.

Ed Straker is the senior writer at NewsMachete.com.