If President Trump has indeed walked away from the House’s stimulus offer, he's turned down what may have been his last, best chance to win reelection. jonathanchait writes
Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images In May, the House of Representatives passed a $3 trillion economic relief bill. Over the next four and a half months, Republicans in the White House and Senate dithered, alternating between good-faith engagement and lethargy. The apparent final blow came in the form of a series of tweets by President Trump announcing an end to negotiations.
Note that Trump, without getting any permission from Democrats, affixed his name to the checks sent out in the last bill. This did not even stop Democrats from offering him the chance to mail out more Trump-branded checks. Pelosi was willing to reduce the size of the next bill to $2.4 trillion, which amazingly was a concession to the incumbent president. Even more amazingly, Trump spurned it as being too generous.
The Washington Post reports that Trump reversed himself, and declared the stimulus bill dead, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him Pelosi was “stringing him along” and the Senate did not have enough votes. Of course, there would be plenty of votes for a Pelosi-Trump deal if Trump campaigned for it publicly. But once again – inverting the stereotype that Congressional Republicans are uniformly subservient to Trump – he has allowed McConnell to control him.
Trump has frequently followed his party’s anti-government wing to politically disastrous outcomes. Trump spent most of his first year trying to pass a wildly unpopular partisan repeal of Obamacare, rather than attempting some kind of bipartisan patch-up bill he could rebrand as Trumpcare. He then passed an unpopular tax cut for wealthy heirs and business owners. He abandoned his populist promises to raise his own taxes, crack down on Wall Street, and rebuild infrastructure.
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