WASHINGTON ― If President-elect Donald Trump wants to call Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) a “clown,” he can expect an answer from his famously loquacious fellow New Yorker.
And Schumer was all too happy to offer one on Thursday when reporters asked about it at a news conference on Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.), Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services.
It boiled down to Schumer telling Trump to spend less time with his beloved social media app and more time actually telling Americans what he intends to do ― especially his plans for replacing the Affordable Care Act, which Republicans are prioritizing repealing.
“I’d say to president-elect that this is serious, serious stuff. People’s health is at stake, people’s lives are at stake,” Schumer said, also trolling Trump with the reality that it will be extremely difficult to craft a genuine replacement plan for Obamacare.
“Now, we understand that President-elect Trump is in a difficult spot, that Republicans are in a difficult spot,” Schumer said. “They want to repeal the ACA, and they have no idea how to replace it.”
Trump had laid into Schumer on Twitter earlier in the day, saying he and other Democrats were not serious about fixing problems with the health care law.
Schumer has said over the last few days that Democrats will do everything they can to stop the GOP’s push to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and especially will resist if Trump and Co. do not offer a serious replacement plan.
Trump’s “clown” gibe gave him another chance to lay out the stakes.
“Instead of calling names, [the] president-elect should roll up his sleeves and show us a replacement plan that will cover the 20 million Americans who gained coverage, that will cover students or post-college students, 21 to 26, who want to stay on their parents plan, that will show how we cover people with pre-existing conditions,” Schumer said. “So I’d say to the president-elect and the Republicans that this is not a time for calling names. It’s time for them to step up if they want to repeal, and show us what they replace it with.”