Trump chooses chaos with delayed signature of Covid relief bill
Over the Christmas weekend, he was
the only man with the power to forestall a government shutdown on Tuesday,
restore jobless benefits to millions of laid-off Americans and prevent further
economic calamity in the days ahead.
Trump appeared interested in doing none of that until Sunday, when days after receiving it.But his Sunday night signature was too late to prevent unemployment aid from lapsing.The delay in signing the package, only to approve it after damage was done, is the latest example of Trump's increasingly erratic behavior in the waning days of his term.
The delay — prompted by Trump's late-in-the-game dissatisfaction with the size of direct payment checks to Americans, his irritation at Senate Republican leaders and a showman's penchant for keeping people guessing — also pushed the government within 30 hours of shutting down.
All weekend, 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.
He remained out of public view in Florida, traveling back and forth to his namesake golf course without revealing his intentions. His top lieutenants, who might have wrung some clarity out of their truculent boss, were on their own holiday getaways: Vice President Mike Pence at the ski slopes in Vail and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin near the beaches of Cabo San Lucas, Mexico.
Even in the lead-up to signing the bill, Trump seemed focused more on creating suspense than on appeasing Americans' worries.
Seeming to realize the mess he'd created, Trump's statement afterward appeared face-saving, insisting that one of his trade-offs for signing the bill was lawmakers agreeing to "focus strongly on the very substantial voter fraud which took place in the November 3 Presidential election" — a promise Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made no mention of in his own statement praising Trump's decision to sign the legislation. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the election that Trump lost to President-elect Joe Biden.
As he departs office, Trump is intent on wielding — or, in this case, withholding — his executive authority in ways that punish his rivals, distract from his loss and ensure he remains the center of attention even as a lame duck.
He has been more unpredictable than at any point in his presidency, and aides on Sunday told even as they pressed Trump to approve the relief measure, they couldn't say for certain how he would proceed.
It's a scenario that is thrusting fresh turmoil into the final days of his tenure as president. His souring relationship with Senate Republicans, sinking faith in his own administration aides and reliance on a conspiratorial new circle of advisers are fueling the sense that Trump is departing office on deeply unstable terms. He is due to remain at his Florida club for several more days, returning to Washington early in the new year to resume his futile efforts at overturning the election, including the January 6 Electoral College ratification Trump seems misguidedly convinced his allies can prevent.
"To play this old switcheroo game...I don't get the point," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois,"State of the Union" hours before Trump signed the bill. "I don't understand what's being done, why, unless it's just to create chaos and show power and be upset because you lost the election."