Stocks fell off a cliff just before closing yesterday evening because Trump abruptly tweeted that he was canceling any further stimulus talks with congressional Democrats until after the election.
But Trump deleted those tweets after seemingly realizing that he fucked up.
Trump began backpedaling within hours and now he's practically begging Speaker Nancy Pelosi to rescue him.
In a barrage of tweets, Trump pressed for passage of these chunks of assistance, an about-face from his abrupt and puzzling move on Tuesday afternoon to abandon talks with a longtime rival, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The California Democrat has rejected such piecemeal entreaties all along.
Trump’s tweets amounted to him demanding his way in negotiations that he himself had ended.
He called on Congress to send him a “Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200)” — a reference to a preelection batch of direct payments to most Americans that had been a central piece of negotiations between Pelosi and the White House.
Honestly, reading the line highlighted above is the hardest I've laughed in days.
Telling Nancy Pelosi to send him a stand alone bill for stimulus checks, or anything else for that matter, conveniently ignores the fact that such a bill would have to clear through the Republican-controlled Senate. You may recall that Senate Republicans removed stimulus checks from their own stimulus proposal because a majority of their own members are opposed to it and some do not believe in passing additional stimulus at all.
Senate Republicans have also adjourned for the next two weeks at the very least because of the COVID cluster of infections that spread from Trump's White House to the Senate GOP. A skeleton crew of senators have remained in Washington just to ram through the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, not to advance stimulus measures.
House Democrats passed a comprehensive stimulus bill in lay May, but Republicans spent the last five months focused on one thing and one thing only: confirming as many conservative judges as they can before the music stops.