“I think it’s a nightmare that everyone is going through, and they all say it must end,” Biden said Tuesday when asked if he was expecting a “honeymoon” of early political will to help liberate the nation. of the pandemic and its consequences.
The dowdy last days of the Trump White House later hit new lows as the president wielded his untouchable power of pardon, substituting political payouts for justice in yet another morally questionable use of executive power.
As the daily Covid death toll soared above 2,900, Trump focused on securing two acolytes who lied to investigators in the Russian probe and two staunchly supportive former GOP congressmen convicted of financial crimes.
He also spared guards from the private security company Blackwater, founded by a political supporter, Erik Prince. The guards unleashed sniper fire, machine guns and grenades on innocent men, women and children in Iraq in 2007.
Vice President Mike Pence – a day after getting a coronavirus vaccine available to just a small fraction of Americans – appeared before a shoulder to shoulder crowd mocking the social distancing protocols he should be promoting as the head of the coronavirus of the government working group. The event included the constant priority of political expediency over public health that underpinned Covid-19’s disastrous mismanagement by the White House.
Trump remained incarcerated in the White House until his last, most conspiratorial loyalists, devised new ways to destroy Biden’s legitimacy in his baseless quest to undo his apparent electoral defeat.
“We see a petulant child who doesn’t like it gets a tantrum,” a senior Republican close to the president told CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.
A bomb in Washington
In a new effort to maximize his fading influence, Trump released a video on Tuesday expressing his disapproval of the Covid bailout for not containing larger one-off stimulus payments and leaving open the question of whether he will sign the bill.
The president is not alone in trying to raise meager $ 600 payments to working-class Americans and points to funding for pet projects that have been included in the bill by lawmakers. But many of Trump’s own GOP allies were against higher payments. And his intervention is an act of political destruction, as it threatens to disrupt a fragile deal staged in arduous negotiations and cause millions of Americans and small businesses to lose access to much-needed aid.
Trump’s apparent threat to veto the package just passed by Congress could further deepen the country’s dire economic conditions.
The president’s new demand for payments of $ 2,000 for every American will strike a chord with many people who viewed the stimulus checks folded into the bill as stingy.
It may not be a coincidence that Trump’s move – announced at the White House that he is due to leave in 28 days – could ruin Christmas for Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, who broke with the president last week by acknowledging Biden’s election victory.
And the president combined his gambit – a classic of Trumpian disruption – with a Machiavellian play that revealed his hopes of disrupting Biden’s presidency and made an unfounded claim that he could still win a second term.
Cramming millions of dollars into the bill for art, foreign aid, and other things, Trump failed to mention that his White House had loaded it with a tax break for business lunches at a time when many Americans are starving.
It is not uncommon for the last throes of a tired, scandal-tainted presidency to be in stark contrast to the energy and sense of mission of the next – it is a natural condition for the constitutionally mandated transfer of power.
But the comparison is especially acute in 2020 at a time of national extremis, amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, a consequent economic disaster, and an outgoing president maximizing the tools of his power for self-righteous ends, while he the result of a fair election he lost.
Biden tries to fill the leadership vacuum
Biden made a fresh effort on Tuesday to provide the kind of national leadership that has been the hallmark of Democratic and Republican presidencies for decades and has long been missing from Trump’s. That vacuum is especially visible during the pandemic and a Russian hack of the US government.
Biden warned that breakthrough vaccines were scarce and that, despite the hype from the Trump team, it would be “many months” before most Americans were available. And in the kind of invigorating message Trump never took, he warned that tens of thousands more Americans will die.
‘I’m going to tell you the truth. And here’s the simple truth: Our darkest days in the fight against Covid are ahead, not behind us, ”said the president-elect in Wilmington, Delaware.
Biden also expressed an unusually strong condemnation of an outgoing president by an elected president over Trump’s absolution from Russia for a massive cyber-attack on US federal servers that his administration has blamed on the Kremlin.
“This attack happened under Donald Trump’s watch, while he wasn’t looking,” Biden said of a presidential response that has only deepened the mystery surrounding Trump’s bizarre deference to President Vladimir Putin.
“It is still his responsibility as president to defend US interests for the next four weeks. Rest assured, even if he doesn’t take it seriously, I will.”
The start of a pardon spree
The wave of grace announced by the president on Tuesday was perfectly within his constitutional powers. And many other presidents have offered clemency in a way that ensures that supporters who get caught up in scandals get tickets that don’t come out of prison. But no modern president has used the privilege so defiantly for political ends or so short-circuited the Justice Department’s presidential leniency procedures. And the pardon announced Tuesday is likely just a down payment for more controversial moves in the coming days.
Trump forgave former campaign manager George Papadopoulos and Dutch lawyer Alex Van der Zwaan, who had both pleaded guilty to lying to investigators during the Russia investigation. The pardons likely indicate a forthcoming attempt by Trump to unravel the devastating results of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which provided evidence that he may have obstructed justice and the many questionable contacts between Trump Acolytes and Russia during an election in which it Kremlin intervened to explain. help Trump.
The president also pardoned two Border Patrol agents convicted in 2006 of shooting and wounding an unarmed undocumented immigrant and then hiding him.
Former Rep. Duncan Hunter, a California Republican who was sentenced to 11 months in prison and three years of supervised release earlier this year in connection with his misuse of more than $ 200,000 in campaign funds for personal expenses, was also pardoned.
Another outspoken Trump supporter, former Rep. Chris Collins, a Republican from New York, will be released from prison, where he has just started serving a 26-month term after admitting he conspired to commit securities fraud and made a false statement.
The four Blackwater guards – Nicholas Slatten, Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard – were convicted by a federal jury in 2014. Prosecutors accused the men of illegally unleashing “powerful sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers on innocent men, women and children.”
Blackwater said the convoy had been attacked and defense attorneys said in court that witness statements were being fabricated. But witnesses stated that the contractors opened fire without provocation.
The White House said their pardon was supported by a number of members of Congress, along with Pete Hegseth, the conservative Fox News presenter who is an ally of the president.