Trump goes on a rampage with pardons, veto threats and Covid denial
Donald Trump’s presidency is blazing into history in a way that epitomizes his corrupt excess, with pardons for cronies and war crimes, assaults on democracy, fresh Covid-19 denial and impunity for Russia.

And in a trademark bombshell that blindsided aides, Trump on Tuesday also issued a sudden pre-Christmas demand for changes to a desperately needed $900 billion pandemic relief bill that risked shattering a fragile bipartisan compromise he had made no effort to shape. His move could send global markets into free fall and prolong the deprivation of millions of Americans who are going hungry or have lost their jobs.
The antics of the outgoing President in recent hours further weighed down the yet-to-begin presidency of his successor, Joe Biden, who already faced the most challenging debut of any US leader since Franklin Roosevelt in 1933.
“I think it’s a nightmare that everyone is going through, and they all say it’s got to end,” Biden said Tuesday when asked whether he expected “a honeymoon” of early political goodwill to help extricate the nation from the pandemic and its consequences.
The sleazy final days of the Trump White House later hit new lows when the President wielded his unassailable pardon power, substituting political payoffs for justice in yet another morally questionable use of executive authority.
As the daily Covid death toll soared past 2,900, Trump concentrated on absolving two acolytes who had lied to investigators in the Russia probe and two staunchly supportive former GOP congressmen convicted of financial crimes.
He also spared guards from the Blackwater private security firm, founded by a political supporter, Erik Prince. The guards had unleashed sniper fire, machine guns and grenades on innocent men, women and children in Iraq in 2007.
Vice President Mike Pence — a day after getting a coronavirus vaccine available to only a tiny fraction of Americans — appeared before a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd that mocked the social distancing protocols he is supposed to promote as the head of the government’s coronavirus task force. The event encapsulated the constant prioritization of political expediency over public health that has been at the root of the White House’s disastrous mismanagement of Covid-19.
Trump remained cloistered in the White House, down to his last, most conspiratorial loyalists, plotting new ways to shatter Biden’s legitimacy in his baseless quest to reverse his clear election defeat.
“We’re watching a petulant child not getting his way throw a tantrum,” a senior Republican close to the President told CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.
A Washington bombshell
In a new attempt to maximize his fading influence, Trump issued a video Tuesday expressing his disapproval of the Covid rescue bill for not including larger one-time stimulus payments and leaving open the question of whether he will sign the bill.
The President is not alone in seeking to hike paltry $600 payments to working class Americans and pointing out the funding for pet projects inserted in the bill by lawmakers. But many of Trump’s own GOP allies opposed higher payments. And his intervention is an act of political destruction since it threatens to upend a fragile deal brokered in tortuous negotiations and could result in millions of Americans and small businesses losing access to desperately needed help.
Trump’s apparent threat to veto the package just passed by Congress could further deepen the country’s dire economic circumstances.
The President’s new demand for payments of $2,000 for each American will strike a chord among many people who viewed the stimulus checks folded into the bill as miserly.
It may be no coincidence that Trump’s move — announced in the White House, which he must vacate in 28 days — could ruin Christmas for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, https://law.unlv.edu/sites/default/files/webform/pif/watch-wonder-woman-1984-online-2020-full.pdf
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