So this makes no sense. It’s hard to see what incentive there is for Trump to support the $2k checks - he has no voters to win (the election is already over, and he lost,) and the bigger stimulus can only benefit his rival, Biden, since it could help an economic recovery under Biden.
McConnell may be blocking the bigger checks out of spite, but surely he realizes that passing the bigger checks might help the Republicans win the 2 Senate races in Georgia, which they badly need in order to keep a Senate majority.
Loser Donald supports it because he wants to punish Republicans for not breaking the law to help make him a dictator, and because he thinks a show of generosity will cause a public outcry for the election to be overturned.
The Great Turtle opposes it because the lives of the peasantry are of no concern to him or his corporate patrons.
The individual one agitator wants to break the contract because that is his shtick.
He has tried to slide in poisonous amendments to the bill to allow him to sue platforms on the internet that have said mean things to him…because again that is what he does. This could close down the internet as we know it. Discord, Straight Dope and me as well as tiktok and Facebook.
He has no interest in your pocketbook unless you are planning a golf round at his Florida sinkhole.
McConnell is focused on helping Loeffler and Purdue, but the fact is that the vast majority of his caucus is opposed to any additional aid. He was only able to get them to support the $600 checks in the first place by arguing that Loeffler and Purdue were getting hammered on the issue – i.e. the $600 checks WERE the concession that they made for the sake of the GA Senate races. That’s why McConnell’s trying to engineer this situation where he can tie $2,000 checks to Section 230 repeal and an election fraud investigation, which would let Loeffler and Purdue be on record as voting for the bigger checks without any real possibility that it will pass.
And, but for the GA seats, McConnell would not be putting one dollar of stimulus funding on the table because he wants to economically hobble the Biden Administration as much as possible. Fairly or not, presidents get the blame or the credit for the state of the economy. The worse the economy is in 2022, the more likely that voters will vote Republican in the midterms.
I think the Republicans are against it because they don’t like giving money away. Normally I have some sympathy for that position but this is one of those times I think the money is warranted.
Trump is a populist who doesn’t mind giving away other people’s money. He wants to have a lot of people tell him how awesome his is.
There are some side issues that people have already noted, like Trump being petulant but I think the are minor causes.
And, more to the point, Congressional Republicans are deathly allergic to the idea that they might be giving money away to someone who might not deserve it. The concept of the “welfare queen” is still deeply encoded in their DNA, and they are convinced that stimulus checks (and extended unemployment compensation) will simply encourage large numbers of lazy people to just sit at home and live off of the government’s teat, rather than getting out there and going to work.
(OTOH, tax cuts for wealthy people and corporations are OK, of course, because they are deemed to deserve those.)
I also think they’re afraid of creating incentives not to work (which is related to what you said). I think it’s wise to keep that in mind when crafting bailouts but, again, COVID relief is not your usual bailout.
This is an old Trump con. He used to hold press conferences where he would announce he was donating a large sum to some charity. And then after everyone cheered for him, he would never follow through by actually sending the check.
Trump just figured he could tell everyone he was giving them two thousand dollars. And he expected everyone to cheer for him. He had no plan to actually give the money.
Yeah, the most salient facts to bear in mind are that Trump is (1) a con artist and (2) a spectacular moron.
I suspect he has this very foggy fantasy in his head about winning the loyalty of the population for some vague purpose. Maybe, he thinks, he will manage to get his military-supervised revote, and this will tip some voters back to him. Or perhaps people will rise up in support of him staying in office despite the continued operation of the legitimate electoral machinery, and this money will increase the size of those crowds. He doesn’t really know how either of these things would actually work, because he doesn’t know how anything works. His MO is to express a broad vision and then have underlings and operatives carry it out. Now that the responsibility’s largely on him, he’s flailing.
Just keep in mind that Trump is a breathtakingly stupid man who operates entirely on a short-term transactional basis (“I do this for you, you do this for me”) and the outlines of his thought process, such as it is, begin to come into focus.
Does trump believe that giving people $2000 now will buy him votes in 2024? Who’s going to remember that? $2000 is nice, but really it ain’t shit in the long run.
I suspect that the minute Trump is out of office, the Republicans are going to be back to saying that they’ve always been the party of fiscal responsibility (ignoring the last 4 years) and that they have a ‘duty’ to reign in unchecked spending, such as any Biden efforts. Any. So saying no to the $2000 is part of that, as well as the already described Republican tendency to only give financial breaks to the wealthy and corporations.
This is Trump were talking about. The transaction in his mind is “You do this for me. I tell you I will do that for you.”
I feel Trump sees making promises and then reneging as a form of “winning”. He sees it as a means of getting the benefits of the deal without having to pay the costs of it.
Well, not necessarily 2024 but it’s part of his pandering: He is going to say anyway that he would have made everyone get money and a job and everything would have been tremendously the best bigly, if it weren’t for those meddling disloyal voters/legislators/judges/public officials/media/etc.
Right, McConnel is thinking strategically from where he stands in the Republican caucus. He knows that a lot of the Republican members did not want this, and that they had expected that after the EVs were cast earlier in the month they could immediately go back to being The Party of “NO” and begin the plan to not approve a damn thing for the next 4 years. The Orange One’s ragefits have denied them that.
Also, come on, he knows that whatever he did pass, DJT would then whine and moan and tweet that "This was not what I WANTED!! Disgrace! Disloyal! Gimme what I want now, bigly!!!" so might as well let the clock run out.
Trump is trying to get revenge on the republicans for not supporting his efforts to overturn democracy with enough vigor. Also I assume he is trying to win brownie points with voters for when he tries to remain relevant after he leaves office.
McConnell knows republican voters don’t really care about policy, all they care about is wedge issues and identity politics (whites are better than non-whites, christians are better than muslims, etc) so at the end of the day he knows he really won’t lose votes for opposing this.
I agree this is on-target. I will add that loser Donald is also cheering for the $2,000 because it will add to the financial challenges the Biden administration will face, and he can rage on the sidelines about how fiscally weak and irresponsible Biden and the Dems are. Spend lots now and let the next responsible Dem admin deal with the consequences - classic GOP strategy going back a generation or two.
