Senate Republicans have spent months effectively rubber-stamping Donald Trump’s most outlandish and unqualified nominees, but Paul Ingrassia was a bridge too fareven for GOP senators. There was no great mystery as to why.

The president tapped the right-wing lawyer and former podcast host to lead the Office of Special Counsel, but Ingrassia’s history of radicalismincluding a group text in which Ingrassia acknowledged his “Nazi streak,” derailed his nomination and created the latest in a series of embarrassments for the White House.

But as the dust settled on the fiasco, there was one question that still needed an answer. When Trump chose Ingrassia for the OSC job, he was serving as the White House liaison for the Department of Homeland Security. Given the revelations about his record, would the president and his team show him the door or not?

Now we know. Politico reported:

According to the email Ingrassia sent, Trump personally called him into his office Wednesday night to offer him the GSA job.

Blue Light News’s report added, “A White House official confirmed the move and added that Ingrassia ‘is a very helpful addition to GSA and will successfully execute President Trump’s America First policies.’”

Let’s take stock. The president hired a right-wing lawyer with a record of extremism, then offered him a promotion. At that point, the right-wing lawyer’s record generated additional scrutiny, and the White House learned, among other things, about a message in which Ingrassia wrote, “I do have a Nazi streak in me from time to time, I will admit it.” This made him politically radioactive to Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Less than a month later, Team Trump decided to give him a different promotion.

In other words, as the first year of the president’s second term nears its end, Trump and his team decided these revelations were not disqualifying.

In the wake of Tucker Carlson’s recent interview with Nick Fuentes, there’s been an intensifying public conversation about the right’s antisemitism crisis. By any fair measure, the White House’s latest reward for Ingrassia makes that crisis worse.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an BLN political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

The government shutdown is over, and Democrats have failed to obtain an extension of subsidies for plans under the Affordable Care Act. That means premiums will skyrocket for the tens of millions of Americans who get their insurance through the ACA marketplaces. While Democrats look for other ways to save the subsidies, though, the party also needs to lay the groundwork for a bigger fix to America’s broken health care system.

It’s been a decade and a half since President Barack Obama signed the ACA into law, which in turn came a decade and a half after Bill Clinton’s failed attempt at health care reform early in his presidency. For the last 15 years, Democrats have said the same thing about the Affordable Care Act: The law has done a tremendous amount of good, but it’s far from perfect. Despite the ACA’s successes, our health care system is still a failure in multiple ways, and only one party wants to fix it. The time is now to start planning for the next phase.

Every Democratic president in the 80 years since Truman made at least some attempt to move toward universal coverage and containing costs.

In 1945, President Harry Truman proposed that the federal government provide health insurance to all. “Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health,” he said. “Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.”

That time, in fact, kept arriving; every Democratic president in the 80 years since Truman made at least some attempt to move toward universal coverage and containing costs. There were successes along the way, including Medicare, Medicaid and the ACA itself. But most Americans are unhappy with the U.S. health care system as a whole, even if many are happy with their own insurance.

Although health care is typically one of the party’s strongest issues, Democrats have largely been on the defensive since the ACA was passed in 2010. They’ve worked hard, mostly with success, to beat back Republican attempts to repeal or undermine it. This has been a necessary and noble effort: Since the ACA’s passage, the share of Americans without health insurance has been cut in halffrom 16% to 8%. But 27 million Americans are still without coverage. That number is expected to increase dramaticallyboth because of the expiration of enhanced subsidies and because Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” includes massive Medicaid cuts and restricts access to ACA marketplaces.

That means Democrats have no choice but to come up with a new plan they can present to the public for health reform — and it has to be more than just reinforcing the ACA.

This will require both policy work and political advocacy, which was exactly what the party did after Clinton’s reform failed. Health policy experts spent years researching and developing ideas, and by the time the 2008 election arrived, the party had coalesced around an outline of what would become the ACA — a combination of subsidies for people in the middle to buy insurance, an expansion of Medicaid and a mandate for everyone to get covered. While Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards argued about the details in that year’s presidential primary, their differences were minor because they were working from a policy consensus that had already taken shape.

Twelve years later, there was another intense debate over health care in a Democratic presidential primary. And though it seemed in 2020 that there was a gulf between the ideas from progressives, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders’ proposal for a single-payer system, and those from the more moderate candidates, including Joe Biden, in truth the whole party had moved left. Even Biden’s plan, which centered on a public option, was far more progressive than the ACA.

Opponents of health care reforms count on Americans believing that we can’t have anything better.

But once he took office, Biden essentially put that plan in a drawer and never spoke of it again. You can argue that he wouldn’t have been able to pass it through a closely divided Congress, but he never tried to build the support that would have made it possible.

So what should Democrats do now? The answer is that they should spend the next couple of years debating it among themselves. Task the policy experts with devising a menu of options, talk to voters, begin advocacy for real reform and see where support builds. Then, when 2028 comes, have the debate during the presidential campaign when the largest number of Americans are paying attention.

My own preference would be to model our next reform on the combination of public and private insurance that’s used successfully in various forms in countries such as Australia, Canada, France and Denmark. In this system, the government provides basic insurance that covers everyone, and people are free to buy supplementary private insurance if they want more benefits. Liberals like it because of the universal coverage, and conservatives like it because rich people can still buy all the benefits they want.

We could get there by expanding Medicaid — which already covers more than 77 million Americans — to everyone under 65, while allowing seniors to keep Medicare. Yes, there would be many details to work out. And powerful forces will array themselves against meaningful reform — not just the GOP, but the many people, organizations and companies that benefit handsomely from the current system.

Opponents of health care reforms count on Americans believing that we can’t have anything better, or at the very least that it can only be a little bit better. But we know that isn’t true, because every other industrialized country on Earth has a national system that is far less expensive than ours, yet still insures all or virtually all residents.

Last weekend, President Donald Trump proposed sending money to Americans instead of to insurance companies. He later said that people will “feel like entrepreneurs” when they’re “able to go out and negotiate their own health insurance.” It’s an incoherent and nonsensical idea that will only make health care expensive. But Republican lawmakers quickly signaled support, with Sen. Rick Scott of Florida saying he was “writing the bill right now.”

Unlike their opponents, Democrats need to be serious about health care. And that means finding the next big proposal to get closer to a system that all Americans can actually count on and afford. It won’t be an easy process, and it won’t be quick. But that makes it all the more important to start now.