Donald Trump: Can the party of US spoilers last? | Business

It’s been nearly four years since Congress passed, and Donald Trump signed, a massive relief bill aimed at limiting the economic suffering caused by Covid-19. The Coronavirus Assistance, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act did its job. Although about 25 million Americans temporarily lost their jobs — job losses primarily due to fear of contagion and not officially announced shutdowns — the financial pain was far less than expected, given the magnitude of the public health crisis.

In fact, according to a Federal Reserve survey, the percentage of Americans who were “doing at least well financially” was actually higher in July 2020 than it was before the pandemic, likely because for many people, government assistance, including one-time checks and a large Enhanced unemployment benefits more than offset the loss of jobs and businesses.

What’s more, fears that generous pandemic subsidies would undermine America’s work ethic — that adults would drop out of the workforce and never return — turned out to be completely unfounded. That’s the title of a new document from the San Francisco Federal Reserve Why is active population participation so high in the most productive age?. It notes that Americans between the ages of 25 and 54 are more likely to be in the workforce now than at any time since the turn of the century. So the CARES Act was a major policy success. But given the latest political events, I’ve started to wonder: What if the Democrats in 2020 behaved like the Republicans in 2024?

Imagine an alternative narrative in which Joe Biden, already the overwhelming favorite to become the Democratic presidential nominee, urges Democrats in Congress not to pass a relief bill—just as Trump has bullied Republicans into voting against the border security bill—believing that reducing Americans’ suffering would help Trump get re-elected. can be found.

Imagine a story in which then-Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi behaved like current Republican Speaker Mike Johnson and blocked a bill that attempted to send an urgent national priority to the floor.

It seems clear that the CARES Act did, in fact, help Republicans politically. It is true that they lost the White House in 2020, but by a less decisive margin than many expected, and that, even though the Democrats took control of the Senate, they did so by a slim margin. Republicans could have fared worse if Trump presided over a massive Covid-induced depression.

And the Republican Party continues to benefit from that Covid aid package. Republicans are constantly bragging about how well the economy was doing under Trump, which is curious given that Trump was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave the White House with fewer employed Americans than he did. The trick here is that they pretend 2020 never happened, a sleight of hand that only works because federal aid allowed many Americans to emerge from the pandemic-induced recession in better financial shape.

Now, my fantasy story did not and could not happen. For starters, Pelosi is not that kind of politician. Of course, he is biased, but as far as I know, he has never engaged in political extortion by taking the welfare of the country hostage. For example, in 2019, he brokered a bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt ceiling, averting a potential financial crisis, with an agreement that even Trump himself acknowledged did not include “any poison pills.” And even if Pelosi wanted to engage in economic sabotage, her colleagues would almost certainly refuse to go along with it.

But Trump’s Republicans (and recent events have confirmed that Trump really owns the Republican Party) are everything that the 2020 Democrats were not. They have rejected the border security and foreign aid bills they themselves sought and then negotiated, which were tougher than Democrats would have liked. And they don’t even try to hide their innocent arrogance. They want to block a border deal, even one that gives them almost everything they want, because any deal could limit their ability to attack Biden on the issue. Oh, and a significant portion of Republicans, Trump included, would prefer to withhold aid to Ukraine because Vladimir Putin is clearly their kind of man and they’re happy to see their democratic neighbor crushed.

It’s clear that Biden wants to make Republican sabotage a major issue in the 2024 campaign—just like when Harry Truman ran against a “do-nothing Congress” in 1948—with the added bonus that, this time, Republicans try to undermine him more or less openly. American interests for political gain. Whether this strategy will work remains to be seen. But even if it works, and Biden wins, even if the Democrats take full control of Congress, I worry about the future. One of the two major political parties in the United States is now dedicated to trying to achieve power at all costs and will try to make the nation ungovernable if a Democrat sits in the White House. How long can our democracy survive in this situation?

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