Trump
detonates a truth bomb in the Georgia Senate races
Opinion by
Columnist
Dec. 23, 2020 at 9:51 a.m. CST
President Trump might
not realize it, but he just handed Democrats a big weapon to wield against the
two Republican senators running in the Georgia runoffs.
By abruptly calling for $2,000
stimulus checks on Tuesday night, Trump inadvertently exposed core truths about
the consequences of continued GOP control of the Senate — ones that Republicans
are working to conceal — and about the post-Trump Republican Party in general.
In the video
that Trump tweeted,
he threatened to wreck the carefully negotiated settlement that led Congress to
pass a $900 billion economic rescue package. He insisted that its $600 stimulus
checks are insufficient and called on lawmakers to increase the payment to
$2,000.
Trump’s threat not to
sign the deal makes a government shutdown more likely, and it puts
congressional Republicans who supported it in a terrible spot. As one GOP
observer noted,
Trump “just pulled down the pants of every Republican who voted for it.”
But this also gives
Democrats a strong argument against Georgia’s GOP senators, Kelly Loeffler and
David Perdue. It demonstrates, once again, that the only real obstacle to more
generous economic assistance is the Republican Party.
That’s why Jon
Ossoff, Perdue’s Democratic challenger, jumped on Trump’s missive. Ossoff told
CNN that
Congress absolutely must “send $2,000 checks to the American people right now,
because people are hurting.”
Ossoff added that
Republicans such as Perdue are only now backing $600 stimulus checks, after
they “obstructed direct relief for the last eight months.” Top Democrats also
declared that it’s time to deliver $2,000, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
(Calif.), who set a House vote on the idea:
The hidden beauty of
this is that it destroys the story that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wants
to tell about
how we got here, a story that he hopes will salvage Loeffler, Perdue and his
Senate majority.
McConnell agreed to
this $900 billion deal in part to save his Georgia senators, admitting that they were “getting hammered” over opposition to
stimulus checks. His spin now is that Republicans always wanted to offer this relief
and that Democrats were the obstacle to it.
In reality, Democrats were the ones demanding more generous aid — and
bigger stimulus checks — for many months. When the White House and Democrats
were negotiating on a bigger package with larger stimulus payments that
Trump wanted, McConnell opposed it. He didn’t want Republicans to have to vote on it, since
many supported doing little to nothing.
Trump has revealed
Democratic claims about this whole tale to be true — that the real obstacle to
more relief is congressional Republicans. And this in turn spells out the real
consequences of GOP Senate control next year: very little chance of another
ambitious aid package.
Many will point out
that Trump’s lack of engagement all throughout is why Republicans never felt
pressure from his demand for bigger stimulus checks. But that only confirms the
point: White
House aides and
congressional Republicans seized on that disinterest to ensure less spending.
It’s true that
Trump’s demand for big stimulus checks rings hollow, given that he’s spent all
his time lately on overturning the election, not on influencing the talks. But
as Chris
Hayes points out,
there nonetheless just is a core difference between Trump and
McConnell on this.
That’s a problem for
Perdue and Loeffler. When asked about this, they will have to decide between
Trump’s call for bigger payments and McConnell’s opposition to them.
It will be perversely
amusing if Loeffler and Perdue are willing to stick with Trump’s efforts to
subvert the will of the American people — they continue to refuse to say he
lost — but not willing to support his call for more economic aid to them.
The bottom line is
that the story of the past nine months confirms that orthodox
conservative opposition to big spending — even to help Americans suffering amid
two of the biggest crises of the modern era — has been the main obstacle to
assistance for them. Trump has laid this bare.
The Trump effect
To no small degree,
in the runoffs, Loeffler and Perdue are trying to replicate the Trump effect.
Their ads
sell them as urgent checks on a Biden presidency, which is depicted as a Trojan
Horse for creeping socialism pushed by non-White Democratic lawmakers, antifa
mobs burning cities and so forth.
As Matthew
Continetti details,
Trump’s depiction of this fictitious series of emergencies is largely what’s
defining and holding the GOP together in the Trump era. It has flushed new
voters into the GOP electorate — the voters whose turnout is essential in the
runoffs. Without Trump on the ballot, Perdue and Loeffler want to replicate
this effect with similar appeals oriented around those enemies — and around the
lie that the election was stolen from him.
But the focus on this
Trumpist mythology has nothing
to say about
covid-19 or the economy, the two biggest challenges facing the country right
now. Republicans hope to pass the absolute minimum in assistance to paper over
that gaping hole among the sort of swing voters who went for President-elect
Joe Biden, while wielding the Trump mythology to drive base turnout into a
frenzy.
But Trump has exposed
the hollowness of the GOP agenda on these crises. It’s plausible, of course,
that Republicans can win the Georgia runoffs largely on the fumes of that
Trumpist mythology. But their strategy just got a whole lot more precarious,
and Trump himself is to thank for it.