Trump
Directs His Wrecking Ball at the COVID-19 Relief Bill and Mitch McConnell
By John Cassidy
December 23, 2020
Until Tuesday evening,
Donald Trump spent a week largely out of the public eye. After the Supreme Court torpedoed his effort to overturn the
election result, the Electoral College confirmed Joe Biden’s win, and Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally recognized Biden as the President-elect, Trump skulked
inside the White House with even fewer items than usual on his public schedule.
As the days went by, it emerged that he was spending much of his time
consulting with the dwindling band of Administration loyalists, conspiracy
theorists, and out-there elected Republicans who were willing to console him
with the thought that all might not be lost.
Last
Friday, he met with his former national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, whom he pardoned last month, and with Sidney Powell, Flynn’s
attorney, who has been spreading the idea that Trump’s loss was the result of a
Venezuelan plot to rig voting machines in favor of Biden. (Yes, Venezuelan. In
some version of the theory, which originated among QAnon followers, Cuba was
involved, too.) During that meeting, according to the Times, Trump discussed
the idea of naming Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud, and
he also asked about an idea that Flynn had publicly floated: imposing martial
law and ordering the military to oversee a rerun of the election. On Thursday
morning, Trump had taken to Twitter, where he again claimed that the Democrats
had stolen the election, and demanded support from other G.O.P. leaders: “Now
Republican politicians have to fight so that their great victory is not stolen.
Don’t be weak fools!”
But,
while the President was busy examining remaining possibilities to overthrow
democracy, the other business of government was plodding along. In the White
House, aides reviewed a list of potential Presidential pardons so long,
according to some reports, that it fills a spreadsheet. Up on Capitol Hill,
negotiators hashed out the final details of a nine-hundred-billion-dollar covid-19 relief bill, which the House and Senate finally voted
through, on Monday night. At some point, Trump appears to have noticed that
there was life outside his coup fantasy, and more scope for him to cause
trouble—especially for the treacherous McConnell.
At
about seven o’clock on Tuesday evening, the White House announced that Trump
had issued twenty pardons and commutations. The names on the list included two
men convicted in the Russia inquiry for lying to the F.B.I.—George Papadopoulos, who advised the Trump campaign on foreign
policy, and Alex van der Zwaan, a lawyer. Pardons or commutations also went to
three former Republican congressmen who were convicted of corruption, and to
four former contractors for Blackwater Worldwide who were jailed for the 2007
killing of fourteen Iraqi civilians.
Before
anyone had a chance to digest the flimsy-at-best basis for many of the pardons,
Trump unexpectedly made another announcement. In a four-minute video posted on
Twitter, he lit into the covid-19
relief bill—which a White House spokesman had said hours earlier that he
intended to sign—describing it as stuffed with pork and “a disgrace.” After
absenting himself from the negotiations over the legislation for weeks, he
called for it to be rewritten, with the cash payments to individuals raised
from six hundred dollars to two thousand dollars. Although he didn’t explicitly
threaten to veto the legislation, his implication was clear. If Congress didn’t
send him a “suitable” bill, Trump said, the “next Administration will have to
deliver a covid relief
package. And maybe that Administration will be me, and we will get it done.”
In
substantive terms, Trump’s critique had some force to it. As reporters read
through the five thousand five hundred and ninety-three pages of the bill, they
found that it did, indeed, contain a number of costly items unrelated to the
coronavirus, including tax breaks for beer and liquor producers, producers of
wind energy, and Nascar. And some people on Capitol Hill, including Bernie
Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, on the Democratic side, and Josh Hawley,
on the Republican side, had long been calling for the bill to include much
bigger cash payments. But, in political terms, Trump’s intervention was a
wrecking ball aimed at McConnell, who the day before had hailed the new spending
bill as “another historic rescue package to help American families through this
pandemic.”
At
the start of the tortuous negotiations that preceded the passage of the new
spending bill, Trump had made clear that he wanted it to include cash payments
of the type included in the cares Act, which Congress passed in March. But, according
to the Washington Post, it was Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s representative in the stimulus talks,
who proposed setting the new round of payments at six hundred dollars, which
was only half the size of the payments in the March bill. Restricting the size
of the direct payments was a way of keeping down the over-all cost of the bill,
which was a key aim of many Republicans, McConnell especially.
Why
didn’t Trump intervene before the spending bill got to his desk? The answer is
far from clear. The Post’s report said that Trump “had largely been
distracted with overturning the results of the presidential election.” But,
citing an Administration official as its source, the report also said, “He had
long wanted to do more than $600 in checks and kept asking aides why they
couldn’t agree to a bigger number.”
One
thing we know for sure is that Trump’s last-minute intervention delighted
Democrats and put McConnell in a bind. Barely an hour after the President
posted his video, Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, added to the Senate
Majority Leader’s torment by demanding a new vote on Trump’s proposal to jack
up the direct payments. “At last, the President has agreed to $2,000 —
Democrats are ready to bring this to the Floor this week by unanimous consent.
Let’s do it!” Pelosi tweeted. As the night went on, other Democrats
gleefully lined up alongside the Speaker. “We can pass $2k checks this week if
the Senate GOP agrees to stand down,” tweeted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, along with her
fellow-progressive Representative Rashida Tlaib, had already proposed direct
payments of two thousand dollars. Shortly before midnight, Chuck Schumer, the
Senate Minority Leader, retweeted Ocasio-Cortez’s message, and added, “I’m in. Whaddya say, Mitch?”
According to the Wall Street Journal,
the official answer to that question was that McConnell had no comment. The
unofficial answer was probably unprintable. At root, Trump has always been an
incendiary force and a wrecker. As the end closes in on him and his Presidency,
he’s turning his anger on fellow-Republicans. What the outcome of his latest
intervention will be is difficult to predict, but amending the covid-19 spending bill in the next few
days wouldn’t be easy. Many members of Congress have already left town, and
Trump is due to fly to Florida later today. Moreover, the relief package is
tied to a broader bill to fund the entire government. If Trump doesn’t sign
this legislation before next Monday, then, in theory, the government will close
down.
In
short, Trump has created disarray, especially for his own party. He could still
back off, as he has before. If he doesn’t, the outcome of this particular saga
could have big consequences for American pocketbooks, the run-off elections in Georgia, and the polity that Biden inherits. Oh, and
one other thing: Trump still has another twenty-eight days in office to create
yet more mayhem.