Before walking out on the interview in what appeared to be anger over the tone of the questioning, President Trump told Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” that his oft-cited but never-seen health care plan is “fully developed:”
Lesley Stahl: Okay, I'll ask you another health question, okay? ... You promised that there was gonna be a new health package, a health care plan.
President Donald Trump: Yeah.
Stahl: You said that it was, "Going to be great," you said, "It's ready," "It's going to be ready"--
Trump: It will be.
Stahl: "It'll be here in two weeks." "It's going to be like nothing you've ever seen before." And of course we haven't seen it. So why didn't you develop a health plan?
Trump: It is developed, it is fully developed. It's going to be announced very soon —
Stahl: When?
Trump: When we see what happens with Obamacare.
The president did not explain why he was keeping the much-anticipated plan under wraps, with or without a decision on the fate of the Affordable Care Act from the Supreme Court, which is set to hear arguments on a legal challenge to the law a week after Election Day. He did, however, provide Stahl with what the White House said was a copy of the plan.
“Lesley, the president wanted me to deliver his health care plan,” Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said as she handed Stahl an enormous tome. “It's a little heavy.”
In a widely-seen photo taken shortly after the handover, Stahl can be seen opening the book, only to find a blank page, sparking speculation that Trump had used an enormous book filed with blank pages as a prop to back up his claim about having a health care plan. But Stahl said later that the book was not blank. Instead, it was “filled with executive orders and congressional initiatives, but no comprehensive healthcare plan.”
To paraphrase Samuel Beckett: We must go on waiting for the Trump health care plan. We can’t go on. We’ll go on.
