The politics of a bipartisan deal were always tricky, but the president’s abrupt move to upend negotiations removed any ambiguity about who was responsible for the lack of an aid bill.
President Trump’s decision to virtually storm away from bipartisan talks over a coronavirus aid bill less than a month before Election Day was a remarkably perilous act for a president about to face voters and for Republicans who are fighting to keep the Senate and now risk being blamed for the collapse of a compromise that had always faced steep obstacles. Vulnerable Republicans were alarmed at what one of them, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, called a “huge mistake.” Democrats seized on the president’s move to accuse Mr. Trump of callous disregard for Americans struggling amid the pandemic. And by Tuesday night, Mr. Trump himself took to Twitter to try to walk back his own decision to kill the negotiations, suggesting that he might support narrower stimulus measures. But such bare-bones plans have been rejected by Democrats and Republicans alike, and there was little reason to believe they would be successful now. If that holds, there will be no comprehensive plan to provide jobless aid or stimulus checks to Americans, furnish aid to small businesses and airlines, or send federal support to state and local governments, at least for now. The economic recovery will continue to shudder, and Mr. Trump will have left little ambiguity about how a plan to stabilize it finally fell apart. “Trump made this really easy for Democrats,” said Tony Fratto, a former aide to President George W. Bush, who is now a partner at Hamilton Place Strategies in Washington. “Republicans can try to explain that the blame is on Democrats. Democrats only have to hold up Trump’s tweet, taking the blame himself.” Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, did just that on Tuesday evening, in his own Twitter post that said, “Make no mistake: if you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child’s school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that matters to him.” Even as Republicans publicly blamed Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the breakdown, saying she had been unwilling to compromise, multiple aides privately likened the president’s tweets to his 2018 declaration that he would be “proud to shut down the government for border security.” His words at the time effectively handed Democrats political cover for the historic lapse in government funding that would follow, and top Republican officials feared that they could have the same effect now, with voters already casting ballots. In an interview on ABC’s “The View” on Wednesday, Ms. Pelosi said Mr. Trump’s blitz of follow-up tweets calling for tailored aid measures was evidence that he had seen the political downside of ending negotiations, saying the president was “rebounding from a terrible mistake that he made yesterday, and the Republicans in Congress are going down the drain with him on that.” Compounding the political risk, Mr. Trump said the halt in stimulus negotiations would give Republicans time to focus on quickly confirming his Supreme Court nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a move that polls have shown is unpopular with voters.
