-Chooses chaos with delayed signature of Covid relief bill
DM Monitoring
WASHINGTON: 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, he reluctantly signed a Covid relief and government funding bill his own administration helped negotiate and that his own aides claimed he’d approved days ago.
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.
