We have updated our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use for Eurasia Group and its affiliates, including GZERO Media, to clarify the types of data we collect, how we collect it, how we use data and with whom we share data. By using our website you consent to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy, including the transfer of your personal data to the United States from your country of residence, and our use of cookies described in our Cookie Policy.
{{ subpage.title }}
Trump's last 4 weeks in office: vetoed coronavirus relief bill, controversial pardons
Watch Jon Lieber, who leads Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, lend perspective to the big developments in Trump's final weeks in office:
What's going on with the coronavirus relief bill? Will Trump really not sign it?
It's possible. This week he did veto the National Defense Authorization Act, suggesting that he's willing to break some china on his way out the door. And Trump is demanding now that Congress do much more generous stimulus checks to individual American households. That probably can't pass either the House or the Senate because Republicans don't support it. But now Trump is aligned with the Democrats and he's threatening to take down this massive spending bill in order to get what he wants. A little bit of drama around Christmas time. We'll see what happens.
What else is in the bill besides cash payments to Americans?
The bill is really a continuation of what was done inside the Cares Act. And the Cares Act included money for small businesses, forgivable loans that was a lifeline to millions of small businesses in the spring, and it includes $300 cash payments to Americans who are unemployed, plus an extension of federally funded unemployment benefits that will last until about April. There's money for testing and tracing, there's money for vaccine distribution, and there's money to get schools back open. Plus, there's specific targeted money for theater venues and airlines and other industries that are suffering because of the pandemic. All told, it's about $900 billion with money going to everywhere, designed to get us through the winter.
Any controversial Trump Christmas pardons?
Yes, there were a few. Trump pardoned four Blackwater contractors who were convicted of murdering Iraqi citizens during the American occupation there. He's also pardoned two members of Congress who were convicted for crimes that had nothing to do with Trump, or the campaign, or their official duties. And he had pardoned a former aide who was involved in the Russian investigation. So, these aren't the last we're going to see, I think that you're going to see some targeted pardons going out to Trump allies and also potentially broader pardons going out to advance Trump's post-presidency political career.
Trump's chances of proving election interference are over
Jon Lieber, who leads Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington, offers insights on US politics:
Is Trump out of options now that William Barr said the DOJ found no election interference?
Trump's problem isn't William Barr not finding election interference, it's that he lost the election and he lost it by millions of votes, and he lost it in the most important key states by tens of thousands of votes. Now, this was a very close election. The three closest states, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona, Trump only lost by 44,000 votes so far, and if he'd ended up winning those three, we'd have an Electoral College tie. But the election was not close enough that Trump's strategy of trying to kick this to the courts and then getting it to go all the way to the Congress, with an alternate slate of electors, it just wasn't possible. Had the election been a little closer, he might've had a shot. But as it is, his chances are over. Joe Biden's going to be inaugurated on January 20th.
Will Biden's new economic team be able to make progress on a COVID stimulus plan?
This is really out of the hands of Biden's economic team, and it's all about what Congress wants to do. We've seen a lot of progress this week, starting with a bipartisan proposal that came out of the Senate, that a bunch of House members quickly signed up for that forced Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to come down from their $2 trillion number much closer to the compromised $900 billion number. Now the ball is in President Trump's court. If he wants to get a deal, he can send signals to Senate Republicans that he wants to move closer to that $900 billion number. And if no deal gets done, they always have the fallback position of simply extending some of the expiring provisions of the Cares Act into January or February of next year so they can come back and fight another day.
Reports that Trump discussed pardons with his three eldest children begs for an important question, what about Tiffany?
Well, poor Tiffany has always been the forgotten daughter, but I think the reality is these reports are pretty ridiculous. There's no clear crimes that any of the children have been accused of, and where this came from was a conspiracy theory by Sean Hannity that the Biden administration would retaliate against President Trump once he was out of office by going after his adult children. Unfortunately, in order to pardon them in advance, which the President could certainly do, he would need to be pardoning them of an accusation of a specific crime, and in the absence of that, there is no pardon that's available. What probably is going to happen though between now and the end of Donald Trump's term is that the President's going to use his very broad power to commute sentences and part of people to forgive high profile accused criminals, people in his political orbit, and people that are being pushed to him by lawyers like Alan Dershowitz, who's representing a known accused criminal, trying to get a pardon. The President could also commute or pardon people who are in jail for low-level drug offenses, which is something that he did over the summer and he used it to his political benefit. Watch for this to happen if the President truly wants to run again in 2024. He may think there's a new base of voters of convicted felons who are free who love Donald Trump now.