I hope you had a pleasant Christmas. Donald Trump appears to have had a pleasant Christmas. News stories say he played golf with Lindsey Graham on Christmas day. Then Miz Lindsey tweeted this:
After spending some time with President @realDonaldTrump today, I am convinced he is more determined than ever to increase stimulus payments to $2000 per person and challenge Section 230 big tech liability protection.
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 26, 2020
The tech liability protection thing is in the defense funding part of the omnibus bill, I take it. I confess I haven’t followed this issue closely. There’s a discussion of it here. Righties want to revise Section 230, “a 25-year-old law that lets websites moderate third-party content as they see fit without being liable for that content (with a few exceptions). Simply put, you can sue a Twitter user if they tweet something defamatory about you, but you can’t sue Twitter.” In rightie world, social media companies should somehow be forced to publish content righties like no matter how inflammatory, dangerous, false, or libelous it is. How removing liability protection would accomplish that eludes me, however.
Anyway, I say that if Trump wants to make a deal, give folks the $2,000 and strip out the tech liability protection and insist that he sign the damn bill asap. And be clear there will be no more negotiations with him. A lot of people lost unemployment benefits today. Millions will be in a world of hurt if this bill doesn’t become law, like, now. Before the end of the year, at the latest.
Unfortunately Trump is probably just delaying the bill so he can stay in the news. I wish there were some way to declare a news media embargo on him if he doesn’t sign the damn bill. That would probably be the one thing that would motivate him.
Joe Biden released a statement today that begins:
It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority.
This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences. Today, about 10 million Americans will lose unemployment insurance benefits. In just a few days, government funding will expire, putting vital services and paychecks for military personnel at risk. In less than a week, a moratorium on evictions expires, putting millions at risk of being forced from their homes over the holidays. Delay means more small businesses won’t survive this dark winter because they lack access to the lifeline they need, and Americans face further delays in getting the direct payments they deserve as quickly as possible to help deal with the economic devastation caused by COVID-19. And while there is hope with the vaccines, we need funding to be able to distribute and administer them to millions of Americans, including frontline health care workers.
But for Trump, not signing the bill is the equivalent of holding his breath or screaming his head off until he gets want he wants. The problem is, he wants everything. If you made him emperor of the world, that still wouldn’t be enough. He’s like a black hole of neediness.
A day before unemployment benefits for millions of Americans were set to expire, President Donald Trump had a different insult in mind: his former-model wife has yet to appear on the cover of a fashion magazine as first lady.
“Fake news!” he complained on Twitter from Palm Beach, concerned for Melania’s social station on Christmas as Americans hunkered at home, enduring a holiday diminished by pandemic, darkened by the prospect of an imminent government shutdown and shaken by an eerie explosion in Nashville that authorities said was intentional.
A day later, as those jobless benefits for gig workers and self-employed Americans were lapsing, Trump was issuing a string of angry messages about his own perceived injustices: the election he falsely claims was stolen from him and the growing roster of people he’s upset won’t help him reverse it.
I understand he’s blamed Bill Barr, the CIA, Mitch McConnell, pretty much the entire Republican establishment, for his election loss. This is truly a temper tantrum for the ages. I don’t think in all of world history there’s been an explosion of sheer arrested emotional development that was this big or consequential.
