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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (163411)	10/6/2020 5:07:37 PM
From: Julius Wong	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218826

Trailing in the polls, Trump inexplicably doubles down on his least popular arguments President Trump turns to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as he delivers his State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 5, 2019 on Capitol Hill in Washington, as Vice President Pence watches. (Andrew Harnik/AP) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was willing to give President Trump a remarkable election-year gift: a $2.4 trillion bailout package which would inject massive amounts of money into the still-struggling economy. Had the president signed such an agreement into law, Americans would have been able to look forward to receiving stimulus checks, as The Washington Post’s Jeffrey Stein noted on Twitter. People who lost jobs due to the pandemic would have seen an extension of increased unemployment benefits. Key industries such as airlines and food service would have been thrown a lifeline. In tweets Tuesday afternoon, though, Trump rejected the idea. “Nancy Pelosi is asking for $2.4 Trillion Dollars to bailout poorly run, high crime, Democrat States, money that is in no way related to COVID-19,” Trump said. “We made a very generous offer of $1.6 Trillion Dollars and, as usual, she is not negotiating in good faith. I am rejecting their request, and looking to the future of our Country.” Instead, he continued, he would ensure that a stimulus bill passed after he won. In the meantime, the Republican-led Senate would focus not on addressing the still-slow economy but on Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. “Our Economy is doing very well,” Trump insisted. “The Stock Market is at record levels, JOBS and unemployment also coming back in record numbers.” He ended with a shout: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” From top to bottom, this is a baffling strategy for a candidate hyperfocused on reelection. It seems pretty obvious what’s happening: Trump, whose political viability in the 2016 Republican nominating contest was heavily contingent upon the extent to which he echoed the extreme views popularized in conservative media, is playing to what he sees as his base. This has been his approach to the job since he was inaugurated, of course, so it isn’t a surprise. But Trump seems to have become increasingly focused on the subset of his base that’s deeply attuned to Fox News coverage and social media rumors, rather than his actual base of non-college-educated Whites. The former argues that the Supreme Court nomination is a crowning jewel in his presidency and the Pelosi bill simply a handout to Democrats. Many members of the latter, it’s safe to say, could use a boost in their unemployment benefits: 11.2 million fewer Americans are working now than in February, 4.4 million of whom don’t have a college degree. It’s inexplicable that an incumbent president whose primary argument for his reelection is the strength of the economy would prefer to argue that “jobs are coming back in record numbers” — a function of how deep they’d plunged — instead of actually pouring money into the economy to make an improvement tangible, even if not before Election Day. Permanent layoffs continue to increase, with more looming. A president who’s overseen a surge in the federal deficit thanks to 2017 tax cuts weighted toward wealthier Americans has suddenly decided that spending more is unacceptable. Unless, of course, Americans vote for him — in which case he’ll rush a stimulus package “immediately.” It’s possible there’s a legal term for such a promise, but I’m not a district attorney. There’s no evidence that even Trump’s base thinks that putting the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett over a new stimulus plan makes sense. One recent survey showed that even Republicans think the priority should be reversed. But Trump would apparently rather have a clear, Trump-centric win than accomplish something for which he’d need to share credit or which would annoy Sean Hannity. It’s important to recognize the extent to which Trump’s view of what America wants is driven by what he sees on television and Twitter. A good encapsulation of that myopia came in another tweet Trump sent Tuesday, one which read simply: “REPEAL SECTION 230!!!” To an average American, this is indecipherable to the point of seeming like a riddle. To tuned-in Republicans, though, it unfolds into a complex if unoriginal argument: because Twitter blocked a Trump tweet offering misinformation about the coronavirus, he is calling for action to be taken preventing social-media companies from taking steps to block toxic behavior or false claims — specifically by repealing a part of a particular law which a number of conservatives have erroneously argued enables those companies to take those actions. What percentage of his audience could unpack that? What percentage even of the base on which he’s so focused? What portion of that group is going to see the tweet and be newly inspired to cast a vote for the president to have a second term? Trump’s apparent focus on prioritizing smiles on Fox News and thumbs-up emoji in his Twitter mentions over winning votes appears to be gaining momentum. His insistence on checking himself out of the hospital to present an “I beat the coronavirus and so can you” argument will mostly serve to reinforce the broad opinion in the public that he hasn’t taken the pandemic seriously enough. It also has the effect of making sure that people remain hyperfocused on the pandemic, an issue which has done untold damage to Trump politically if not literally. But the breadth of Trump’s self-defeating approach to the moment is perhaps captured best in how wildly he misread or ignored the effect of his tweets about the Democratic proposal. He rejected the stimulus bill, telling America that he was personally deciding against sending them more money and asking that they instead just sort of take his word that the economy was doing well. After all, look at how well the stock markets are doing! Here’s what the Dow Jones industrial average did right after Trump’s tweets. Investors understood the damage Trump was doing, even if Trump didn’t. (“Nobody gets it,” one executive on Wall Street told CNBC’s Brian Schwartz.) But Hannity, one assumes, will offer Trump his congratulations on another masterstroke, another devastating owning of the libs. washingtonpost.com