Trump has driven off the road and into a ditch
The GOP riding in the back seat will have to walk from here
It is very hard to understand Donald Trump’s behavior over the last week. I can’t explain it.
Maybe my friend Mohammad the cab driver can.
Mohammad could never get his cab’s owner to fix the many things wrong with it. After thousands of miles of suffering, he finally quit.
The owner then immediately put the cab in the shop, and everything that was wrong mechanically was put right. The broken-down back seat was restuffed, too. The car was repainted, then driven to the sign-painting shop for new logos.
It looked and ran great. But Mohammad was already driving another cab.
He shook his head at the owner’s way of doing business. “It’s like going on a diet after the divorce,” he said.
A new driver would be won over by the refurbished cab. Mohammad had paid for the big fix, but he would never get the benefit of it.
To Mohammad, this is also the story of President Trump’s announcement a week ago that he was holding out for a better Covid-19 relief/federal funding bill -- after neglecting negotiations that birthed the actual bill passed by Congress. Just like the cab owner ignored its condition until it was too late for his driver.
Trump’s failure to apply himself to reducing the horror of the pandemic preceded his Nov. 3 defeat, but now he was trying to look like Robin Hood in preparation for 2024. Or whatever.
This makes no sense -- like a lot of recent White House machinations -- but people like Mohammad who ascribe to this theory have the past as prologue to support their case. Trump has repeatedly shown that he thinks that just saying something will occur is the same as actually doing what’s necessary to get it done. So to him, perhaps, insisting beyond the last minute on a different bill with bigger relief checks should be the same as actually helping create one. Our hero.
But a new bill was never going to happen, just like almost all of the rest of the things Trump has promised or pronounced.
Not only was his demand too late, but it was bound to be stopped by Senate Republicans, who seem to behave like Mohammad’s taxi owner, too. The people who need the bigger checks have already paid for them with their taxes, or they’ll pay for them with future taxes. It’s their money, just like Mohammad’s cab was fixed with the money he already paid his owner to drive it.
There are other theories. Maybe Trump was punishing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans who finally publicly admitted he lost.
Or maybe he was holding the nation and its Congress hostage until they found some way to convert his loss into victory.
No matter what the bizarre purpose of the initial refusal to sign the bill was, he was indeed holding the nation hostage. Until the bill would become law, unnecessary evictions would take place, food stamps and unemployment compensation would dry up, federal employees would be unpaid, their jobs would go undone. Even with the Sunday signature -- for whatever reason Trump reversed course -- deadlines were missed. Twelve million unemployment checks won’t go out.
Whenever something like that happens to so many people living on the edge, it’s not just inconvenience, it’s hardship. Some people will actually die because of it.
Accurately: More people will die. Many thousand Americans have already died because of official neglect. We’ve been remarkably patient about it. But somehow, what is happening now is the last straw.
It’s unclear what the reason is for threatening not to fund relief, but it’s crystal clear that Trump doesn't care when we see him golfing while the government is about to shut down.
It’s also clear where his heart is when you see who he’s pardoned.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort had both suddenly stopped cooperating with the feds in cases that pointed toward their boss, and nobody does that unless they know they’ve got a way out. Guess they knew.
They knew, and now we all know what we need to know about what’s been going on.
It’s not like most of us had to be convinced that we had a presidential thief and traitor. The election result indicated understanding. But now, many more people have finally seen enough to know they’ve had enough.
Something has changed in the last week. One way to explain it is with “Spoon Theory,” which Long Island’s Christine Miserandino, author of ButYouDontLookSick.com, invented in 2003 to help people understand fellow citizens living with autoimmune disease.
Miserandino had a hard time explaining to her best friend how lupus robs her of energy every day. Inspired, she grabbed some diner tableware as props. She gave a handful of spoons to her friend, and took one away as she listed each task she had to do during the day. When the spoons were gone, someone with lupus, she said, was out of energy.
Trump is like a disease, and Christmas weekend, everyone suffering from it finally ran out of spoons.
But you can drive south with truckloads of silverware and it won’t change what’s about to happen in Georgia.
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