A GOP double-cross, a Dem's absurdity, and the ticking bomb of Trump

PM Carpenter

Remember this? November 11th: “As part of the bipartisan deal to reopen the government, Republicans have promised Democrats a Senate floor vote in December on legislation to extend the expiring [ACA] tax credits.” (Politico.)

Now, Republicans to Democrats: Forget our promise. You had to forget our support-then-sabotage of a 2024 Senate floor vote on comprehensive immigration reform and our betrayals of budget agreements, so you Democrats were well aware of our duplicitous ways.

Were they? Seems like they were the only people gullible enough to accept a Republican guarantee. Not all Senate Democrats, but sufficient numbers for the GOP charade to proceed and play out. The Trump partiers are today as opposed to extending enhanced ACA subsidies as they were 24 days ago. So “a Senate vote on the matter” is a no-go, reports The NY Times.

Worth adding is more evidence of Trump’s weak-mindedness and easy susceptibility to others’ influence: “[He] hinted recently that he might be ready to reach some agreement with Democrats to extend the subsidies and avoid the political fallout,” writes the Times. “Republican leaders quickly talked him out of the idea.” Trump isn’t really his own man.

Unfortunate is that some Democrats across the aisle from Republican leaders are also impostors of manliness — namely, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “We forced them to debate on our turf, and they lost a dramatic amount of ground,” he boasted to the Times. Then, daringly, he said, “Republicans have one week to decide where they stand.”

Chuck, they’ve decided, for Christ’s sake. To tweak a cliché, the Democrats’ top Senate guy was trying to plaster some rouge on a blobfish, creation’s ugliest of all aquatics. “We ended up on our front foot,” he pretended in a blast of sheer humbug and surreal gaslighting.

Ah, but Mr. Schumer has a plan, one more magnificent than the last. We Democrats, he revealed, will spend our Senate time next week demanding a three-year subsidy extension. “Vote for this bill,” you bastards, or boy you’ll be in a world of hurt, threatened Chuck, as we Dems reap the electoral rewards after, decidedly, the bastards bury the vote.

Funny, but sad is that, meanwhile, about 4 million Americans get screwed out of affordable healthcare. And to Schumer’s political point, each of the 4 million is likely to be somewhat unappreciative of his impotent heroics when they start to schedule an essential medical appointment but stop on recalling they have no way to pay for it.

Though the number of such tossed-aside Americans is sizable as well as volatile, it explodes into hundreds of millions of really pissed-off people confronting overall unaffordability. Here we dismiss the blustering Chuck Schumer, ignominious Senate Republicans and their equally disgraceful House colleagues. What can Trump do about it?

The Bulwark’s Catherine Rampell first answers with an astute negative: “Ideally, none of the things he’s currently doing.” Moving to the impossibly positive, for starters he could extend the ACA subsidies, she writes. But that would mean conceding the Dems were right all along, which of course they could not have been, since everything they say is “fake news con job hoax.”

Much larger scale … Trump could downsize the idiotic tariff rates he’s imposed and every American consumer pays for. As Paul Krugman has noted, today’s average rate is higher than Smoot-Hawley’s calamitous, depression-inflaming average. Trump’s tariffs cost middle-income American households roughly $1,700 a year; those of lower income, about $900.

What’s been the effect of these and other Trumpism inanities on his popularity? His most recent net approval from Gallup was a bellowing minus 24 points.

But perhaps a better gauge of his unpopularity is the latest from the Trump-chummy — make that chummiest — folks at RMG Research. Even that sorryass operation was unable to torture his net approval rating above a still-negative 8 points, a stat heretofore unseen from RMG’s reality-cauterizing stooges since the human train wreck steamed back into the White House.

So much for Trump’s reputational heading. Barring some extraordinary, intervening assist from his future roommates in hell, his unpopularity vector will beam a constant southerly direction. The worrisome question concerns Trump’s reaction to what even his narcissistically diseased mind will someday be incapable of denying: that he’s both reviled loser and laughingstock.

I said worrisome. I meant terrifying. Along that line, I’ll not repeat all that I’ve said before about a wounded animal and the hugely amplified danger an injured beast poses to all those who inflicted the hurt, as well as the innocent. And with that, I close.

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