Donald Trump enforces crown aid package

Analysis

The man who did not understand until the end how a president achieves political goals

At the last minute, Donald Trump decided on Sunday to put into effect a corona relief package that he had previously torpedoed on Twitter. The episode makes it clear that the 45th US president failed to reform the political establishment in Washington.

Renzo Ruf, Washington / CH Media

The redemptive message came shortly after 8 p.m. Sunday night, or a little less than 28 hours before the last deadline expired: Donald Trump signed and approved the crown aid package at his pompous Mar- a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida. hence the payment of more than $ 900 billion to unemployed Americans and struggling industries, as the White House announced, even though the president had called for a massive amendment to the law a few hours earlier.

The president also approved a series of spending resolutions so that the federal government can continue to operate until September 30.

This means that on Tuesday night, as was feared over the weekend, the Washington offices will not be closed. And Democrats and Republicans, who negotiated the $ 2.3 billion legislative package shortly before Christmas, were relieved.

Trump sold this last-second buckling as a success. In a lengthy statement, he wrote that the House and Senate would now vote on a next step to increase direct payments to all adult Americans from $ 600 each to $ 2,000 each.

Trump is calling for this increase despite the fact that his own Secretary of the Treasury, Steven Mnuchin, insisted on $ 600 in difficult negotiations with Parliament, against opposition from Democrats, for whom this was too little, and against opposition from the Republicans, who believed in taxpayers. You don’t have to help every American.

Trump also wants to force the national parliament to subsequently eliminate supposedly useless budget lines. “Line by line” he wanted to go through the spending decisions and send them back to the House of Representatives and the Senate, Trump wrote. Although this is legally possible, it is highly unusual as the budget is based on proposals from the White House.

It is almost as unlikely that the House and Senate will launch fraud investigations in the November elections. Trump claimed in his statement that he had received the proper commitments from the House of Representatives and the Senate. “Electoral fraud”, that is, the legitimate victory of Democrat Joe Biden in the presidential elections, “must be eliminated!” Wrote the US president.

No majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate

It’s hard to imagine Trump being able to convince a large enough number of MPs in both houses of his ideas. Democrats have shown interest in higher direct payments during the crown crisis, but their main goal currently appears to be to expose Republicans, as the decisive second-round elections for two Senate seats are due to be held in early January in the state of Georgia.

Republicans, in turn, understand Trump’s criticism of generous spending. Even conservative MPs find it questionable whether the US government is transferring $ 134 million to the autocratic ruler of Myanmar or spending $ 25 million to drive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. But the budget lines are ultimately too small to paralyze parliamentary operations. Even Republicans are increasingly pissed off that Trump is constantly rioting.

And that’s precisely the biggest mistake Trump made in his last and possibly last power struggle with Congress. He mixed the insignificant with the important, forgetting that he no longer had any influence, because, unlike most deputies, he would have to leave his post soon, on January 20. The Washington swamp, which Trump wanted to dry up, turned out to be stronger than the unorthodox president.