Not long after scrapping stimulus negotiations with insults aimed at Nancy Pelosi and Democrats, Trump tried to promote a second check and claimed talks were back on. Pelosi didn’t rule out more talks, but she’s probably going to make Trump crawl.
In one of the more egregious double flip-flops of President Trump’s erratic career, he blew up months of negotiations over COVID-19 relief and stimulus legislation earlier this week, saying they could wait until “after I win.” But the next day, on the same medium (his Twitter account), he began trying to backtrack, tossing out examples of narrow deals he’d sign (all of them ignoring congressional Democrats’ refusal to cut narrow deals throughout this process), to general hilarity. President Trump said Thursday that economic relief talks are back on and could include a new round of $1,200 stimulus checks, two days after he abruptly declared them over and ordered his deputies to stop negotiating with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “Well I shut down talks two days ago because they weren’t working out. Now they are starting to work out, we’re starting to have some very productive talks,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network. He said he believes Pelosi “wants it to happen, because it’s so good for our country, we really need it.” To the extent that Trump’s assertions were rooted in reality, they were apparently based on a conversation his repudiated negotiator, Steven Mnuchin, had with Nancy Pelosi on relief for airlines, which led some observers to think there might be a stand-alone bill benefiting that industry, whose federal payroll subsidies just ran out.
