DONALD TRUMP,
HIGH ON HIS OWN SUPPLY, NOW WANTS TO DO THE STIMULUS DEAL HE BLEW UP TWO DAYS
AGO
The president has been on a particularly crazy
bender, even for him.
BY BESS LEVIN
OCTOBER 8, 2020
Remember
two days ago, when Donald Trump spent his first day back at
work blowing up the economy via tweet?
Which was a self-defeating move so crazy, even for him, that people were
left wondering if the
steroids he was on had affected his thinking? Later that evening, seemingly
unaware that he had literally announced he was cancelling stimulus talks just
hours prior, the president sent out a series of tweets calling for
Congress to immediately pass a relief bill, an about-face that suggested he’d stolen
some syringes from Dr. Sean Conley‘s office and was just injecting
the dexamethasone straight into his mouth. The reversal was so bizarre that the
White House chief of staff told reporters that
in case there was any confusion—which there was!—“the stimulus negotiations are
[still] off.” But uh...just kidding?
Within
a day of tweeting that he was calling off bipartisan talks for a coronavirus
stimulus deal, President Trump phoned House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy and indicated he was worried by the stock market reaction and
wanted a “big deal” with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, per two sources
familiar with the call.… Trump was spooked after seeing the instant drop in the
stock market and intense backlash to his tweet, and he has since directed
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to push for a more
comprehensive relief bill before the election.
A
person who spoke with Trump yesterday said that while he would never use the
word “regret” about scuttling the negotiations, they got the strong impression
that Trump realized he had messed up tactically.
Of course, “tactically“
suggests the president had carefully thought out his decision and wasn’t just
running around the White House flinging his own shit against the walls. In an
interview on Thursday, he tried to claim that he totally knew what he was doing
and abruptly scuttling negotiations was simply another example of The
Art of the Deal in action, rather than the side effects of COVID
treatment (and/or his normally compromised mental state). “I said, look, we’re
not getting anywhere,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “Shut it down.
I didn’t want to waste time. But in any event, we got back—both sides very
capable—we got back, we started talking again. And we’re talking about airlines
and we’re talking about a bigger deal than airlines. We’re talking about a deal
with $1,200 per person, we’re talking about other things.”
As Axios notes, though, the two sides are
still “hundreds of billions of dollars apart and disagree on what’s needed in
the bill, and with only 26 days until November 3, an agreement by Election Day
is still widely seen as unlikely.” Which is unfortunate for the Americans who
desperately need the relief and also for the president who apparently didn’t
realize that injecting a trillion or more dollars into the economy would
actually help his reelection chances, which at present are not looking great.
In likely related news,
the New York Times reported earlier this
week that a study of coronavirus symptoms in the U.S. revealed that “nearly a
third of hospitalized COVID-19 patients experienced some type of altered mental
function,” including confusion and delirium.
And here’s a clip of the
president telling senior citizens, of COVID: “You’re not vulnerable, but they
like to say, ‘the vulnerable,’ but you’re the least vulnerable—but for this one
thing, you are vulnerable.”