After putting tens of millions of Americans through the hell of believing their lives were about to be shattered, leaving them homeless and hopeless, Donald Trump suddenly gave in.
In what would be an embarrassing failure for any other president, on Sunday night Trump signed the $2.3 trillion Covid-relief and government-spending bill he had threatened for nearly a week to veto.
Trump’s main demand was for Congress to increase the $600 stimulus checks for every American included in the nearly 5,600-page bill to $2000.
He didn’t get it.
“THAT’S IT?” asked Politico Playbook. Trump “made all this noise about the Covid relief and government funding bill only to sign it and get nothing in return?”
Well, not quite nothing. Trump’s grandstanding got him another week of the attention he so obviously, so desperately, craves.
Trump “is driving the country through chaos from behind the wheel of his golf cart,” writes CNN analyst Kevin Liptak.
All Christmas weekend, which he spent golfing at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, “instead of explaining himself, Trump played coy, focused mostly on dead-end efforts to challenge his election loss rather than taking a step that would ease the nation’s hardships,” CNN’s Liptak says.
“The crisis was one of Mr. Trump’s own making, after he blindsided lawmakers and White House officials with a videotaped implicit threat on Tuesday to veto the package, which his top deputies had helped negotiate and which had cleared both chambers of Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support,” reports the New York Times.
Trump’s abrupt change of tune came less than 48 hours before a lack of funding would have shut down the federal government and days before a moratorium on evictions of millions unable to pay their rent.
Even so, Americans will pay a price for Trump’s defiance and delay, which allowed unemployment benefits to expire, meaning 14 million people must wait for those vital payments to resume — and the economy will suffer even more than it has already.
“The President’s pointless delay in approving the relief legislation cost millions of Americans a week’s worth of pandemic-related unemployment assistance that they desperately need,” said House Ways and Means chairman Richard Neal (D-MA), according to the Washington Post.
“His stalling only intensified anxiety and hardship for workers and families who are collateral damage in his political games.”
Ironically, the Democratic-led House was expected to vote Monday to boost the direct Covid relief payments to $2000, just as Trump wished. The Republican-led Senate will almost certainly reject it on Tuesday.
