Twitterbating and golfing at his Florida Merde-o'-Lardo golf club, nitwit/ narcissist/ nihilist Donald "Mango Mussolini" Trump is determined to take revenge on the American people and on the institutions and party that let him down in his quest to become president for life. His refusal to approve the COVID relief bill and attached omnibus funding bill has put millions of Americans at risk, with more pain to come:
Unemployment benefits for millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet lapsed overnight as President Donald Trump refused to sign an end-of-year COVID relief and spending bill that had been considered a done deal before his sudden objections. [snip]
Lauren Bauer, a fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, has calculated that 11 million people would lose aid from the programs immediately without additional relief; millions more would exhaust other unemployment benefits within weeks.
Andrew Stettner, an unemployment insurance expert and senior fellow at the Century Foundation think tank, said the number may be closer to 14 million because joblessness has spiked since Thanksgiving. [snip]
In addition to the unemployment benefits that have already lapsed, Trump’s continued refusal to sign the bill would lead to the expiration of eviction protections and put on hold a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses, restaurants and theaters, as well as money for cash-starved transit systems and for vaccine distribution.
The relief was also attached to a $1.4 trillion government funding bill to keep the federal government operating through September, which would mean that failing to sign it by midnight Tuesday would trigger a federal shutdown.
After weeks of White (Supremacist) House assurances that Mango Mussolini would sign the bill, his reneging on a bipartisan deal effectively pantsed Republicans in the House and Senate who had voted for it. It's hard not to believe that was no small part of his intent, as he's been whining on Twitter since the election that Republicans haven't supported his fraud lies and subsequent coup- by- court attempts. Now, he gets to posture that he's a man of the people, supporting a larger stimulus check to which he knows his sociopathic party won't agree. (Democrats tried to pass the additional funding but were blocked by Republicans in the House, who seem determined to live down to their tax- cuts- for- the- rich party's "afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable" philosophy.)
It's a breathtaking act of sabotage and bad faith, essentially the coin of the realm under Mango Mussolini and his Republican sycophants and enablers. That it's coming in the "dark winter" of a killer pandemic that was made far worse and more deadly by Mango Mussolini's incompetence and inhumanity amounts to reckless disregard for the lives of the people he took an oath to protect.
BONUS: Here are scenarios for what could happen next.
