|
In the past 24 hours, we’ve been treated to a combination of first-term and second-term Trump. On Monday, the president agreed to a meeting with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to negotiate a government funding compromise, after both Democratic and Republican stopgap bills failed last Friday. Insiders were concerned mostly about whether Republican congressional leaders would attend to protect their position, lest “Art of the Deal” Trump give away the farm to Democrats.
But by Tuesday morning, Trump realized that his dealmaker persona doesn’t exist anymore, replaced with pure hatred and vengeance. He canceled the meeting in a rambling denunciation on Truth Social, dismissing the Democrats’ “unserious and ridiculous” demands while simply lying about those demands in unserious and ridiculous ways. I have to just roll the tape here rather than summarize:
"They are threatening to shut down the Government of the United States unless they can have over $1 Trillion Dollars in new spending to continue free healthcare for Illegal Aliens (A monumental cost!), force Taxpayers to fund Transgender surgery for minors, have dead people on the Medicaid roles [sic], allow Illegal Alien Criminals to steal Billions of Dollars in American Taxpayer Benefits, try to force our Country to again open our Borders to Criminals and to the World, allow men to play in women’s sports, and essentially create Transgender operations for everybody."
Sigh. Democrats are asking for quite a bit of money—about $67 billion a year—but it’s to maintain enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act health insurance and reverse all the Medicaid cuts from this summer’s GOP reconciliation bill. Trump also whines that Democrats want to eliminate the $50 billion rural hospital fund, but that only exists because the Medicaid cuts took away far more than that from rural hospitals. Democrats also included in their counteroffer the basic demand that Trump actually adhere to the budget, rather than make unilateral cuts or changes.
My concern was always what Democrats would do if second-term Trump, the vengeance guy, said no to their negotiating ploy, no to normal transactional politics. How would they react? Fortunately, they caught a bit of a break: Trump said no in the most obviously insane manner, making it easy to lay the shutdown at his doorstep. |
