McConnell Threw Trump and America Under the Stimulus Bus Because He’s Already Gaming 2022

Mitch McConnell is a purely political animal and he has been in politics for a very long time. He has seen this show before. He knows he won’t have the gavel next year. Therefore, McConnell went to his next, and only, logical power position, which is to wreck the economy as much as possible for Joe Biden, so that Democratic leadership is hamstrung from the get go — and that is why he cancelled the stimulus talks.

Donald Trump had initially planned to cut a second stimulus check right before the election to buy votes and that won’t happen now because McConnell has decided that the better ploy is to knee cap America and let people starve on Joe Biden’s watch — and we’ve seen this show before, too.

What is tragic is that Democrats only got one bite of the stimulus apple. Your assignment for today is to read in full this piece by David Dayen at The American Prospect entitled “End To Stimulus Talks Is A Full Spectrum, Foreseeable Disaster:

What are we to make of Trump, for example, tweeting an end to the relief talks being held by Nancy Pelosi and Steve Mnuchin, only to apparently restart them last night? Being on a powerful steroid that makes you stay up all night is probably the culprit. But the biggest reason is that he’s not in control of the situation. Mitch McConnell is, and he rather brilliantly got Trump to take the fall for it.

Jeff Stein reported out the fact that the end of the talks came right after McConnell held a phone call with Trump, and “suggested… that Speaker Pelosi was stringing him along and no deal she cut with Mnuchin could pass the Senate.” People are wondering why Trump would commit political suicide by denying economic help weeks before an election, when it was McConnell who ended things all along.

It’s no surprise that McConnell is running the show. That’s a no brainer. it’s also a no brainer that he reads the same polls that we do. He knows what’s coming. He just doesn’t know how bad it will be. He’s setting his sights on 2022 because he knows 2020 is all over except for the shouting.

Some blame Nancy Pelosi for not taking a $1.6 trillion offer from the White House. But pay attention to McConnell’s statement above. “No deal she cut with Mnuchin could pass the Senate.” That includes the $1.6 trillion. McConnell barely got a caucus majority for a $300 billion package. Large numbers of his caucus are thinking about 2024 and adopting a Tea Party-style fiscal responsibility posture. So at one level, McConnell is just expressing reality. He can’t pass a bill with mostly Republicans, and he’s never been interested in passing one with mostly Democrats. (If there’s one thing that would hurt his re-election chances, it’s that.)

But there’s an even better explanation for why McConnell would destroy his party’s standing before the election. The answer is: Because he already thinks the election is over. McConnell doesn’t feel like any stimulus would help Trump, or even his endangered frontline members. They’re already done for, as the coronavirus is the most important issue in the election, and there’s a raging outbreak at the White House. There was a poll yesterday showing Joe Biden up 16 points, and another one showing a lead in the sample after Trump’s positive test of 22. Every Republican you think is not going to win, is not going to win.

McConnell, as pure a political animal as we have in America, is playing not for 2020 but 2022, and well beyond. His most important directive now is to get Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court and lock in that strong conservative majority for decades. His second most-important directive is to deny Biden a half-decent economy propped up by stimulus, to make the beginning of his tenure difficult. Ordinary people, and not even his fellow Republican colleagues, don’t factor into the decision.

What looks like a political downside, in other words, is just McConnell banking on a future political upside. He’s plotting his comeback, using the same script as 2009-2010. “We thought—correctly, I think—that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan,” McConnell said about that time. “When you hang the ‘bipartisan’ tag on something, the perception is that differences have been worked out, and there’s a broad agreement that that’s the way forward.”

McConnell wanted and needed a corporate bailout and really nothing else. He waited for months to see what the political situation was going to be, not the economic one.  Now that he understands it, he will not cooperate with Democrats on things like assistance for the American people. We’re in a plutonomy now, so everyone McConnell cares about has already been helped. He will offer that great debate between now and the 2022 election. He will hope to win back his majority in the midterms. And even if he does not, he will have the Supreme Court for a generation. In fact that’s part of the plan: if they obstruct forward movement in Biden’s first two years, McConnell can blame him for lack of action.

The master of the Art Of The Deal is Mitch McConnell. Trump is an easily manipulated dupe that McConnell played — go ask Vladimir Putin. Trump will go down in flames pyrotechnically and he’ll take a chunk of the Republican down ballot with him. Nobody knows how much, but they all know enough to be scared. McConnell will rally whatever troops he has left and they’ll play their obstructionist games from the minority position. Meanwhile, Democrats will announce several stimulus measures and with a unified government should be able to stabilize things. But make no mistake, McConnell is playing dirty, like always, and he will do everything he can between now and election day to get Barrett confirmed and create obstacles for Biden. Trump is toast and it’s fine with McConnell if he turns to charcoal. His usefulness is over. Now he’s just a pain in the ass to McConnell while he refocuses and recalibrates the big picture.