By Matt Underwood President Trump signed a bill to extend unemployment benefits and avert a government shutdown, the White House said in an emailed statement Sunday evening. While Trump signed the current bill providing for $600 checks for most Americans hours before a midnight government shutdown deadline, he will continue his push to bring that amount to $2,000, according to two sources familiar with the planning.
Trump’s delay in signing the $900 billion coronavirus relief bill and $1.4 trillion government funding measure caused unemployment benefits for millions of Americans to lapse overnight. A bipartisan group of lawmakers, angered over the delay, urged Trump earlier on Sunday to sign the measure, saying “too many people” depended on it.
Trump’s strategy here is a good example of how not to use the power of the presidency to negotiate. In many respects, this is a microcosm of his entire presidency.
First, Trump refused to even get involved personally for months, then he watched a supermajority in both chambers negotiate and agree to terms. Then at the last minute, Trump threatens to veto the bills unless if his demands aren’t met, only to back down a few days later and sign it anyways without getting anything he wanted, while looking weak.
And Trump hung his Treasury secretary, whom he deputized to negotiate the deal, out to dry, while pissing off the rest of his party.
That’s Trump’s art of the deal. A lot of noise and fury, but little actual constructive action.
This is one of those situations that demonstrates the clear downsides of having a “businessman” in office, especially a private one like trump. trump is probably used to pushing his way into complicated deals/projects late in the process and taking advantage of impatience as multiple parties near the end of lengthy negotiations after overcoming numerous obstacles. I would imagine there are typically various opportunities to leverage the nearness of the completion of a deal/project such that an opportunistic piece of shit like trump can steal a decent amount of value just by threatening to be a nuisance and pushing the completion date down the road.
In the real world, deal makers have incentives that would lead them to give away relatively small amounts of value to them even if it means overpaying guys like trump just to get them out of the way. That’s not how it works in government for many reasons, including:
- Our leaders have shown a willingness to shut the government down in the recent past
- We, the stakeholders in the case of government, tend not to hold our leaders responsible for their fuckups (see: mcconnell packing courts and not allowing House-passed bills to even see the light of day, then winning re-election in what was basically a landslide).
- Businesses tend to have clearly authorized parties to negotiate on their behalf. Even if a decision maker is acting erratically, no one is confused about who has the authority to negotiate so you either make that guy happy or walk away altogether. trump has created a scenario where it’s not even clear who Democrats are supposed to negotiate with. If it’s mnuchin or mcconnell, trump shouldn’t have threatened the veto.
The kind of misdirection he’s creating can be very effective if you have some kind of leverage to squeeze information out of your negotiating partner. There are too many problems with that “logic” to fully explore in this comment, but most notably the fact that he’s out of office in 4 weeks and that Democrats and republicans are both able to call the other side out for obstruction make his tactics useless. That he’s 4 years into his presidency and still doesn’t seem to understand that is almost not real. He might be even dumber than we think.