Impeached president Donald Trump's buffet lunch with Republican senators Tuesday had a lot do to with his reelection and very little to do with the pandemic still raging across the nation. Or the urgent need for more relief. Or the budget crisis states and counties and cities and towns are facing. Or a persistent lack of testing. While a $3 trillion bill that would take care of much of that has been passed by the House and is sitting on Sen. Mitch McConnell's desk, there is a profound sense that Republicans don't give a damn anymore. They saved their rich friends, so they're good.
"We have a lot of priorities," Trump told reporters covering Tuesday's meeting. None of which were brought up in the lunch meeting. "I asked him specifically whether he thought we needed to do another bill and what in his opinion should be in it. And he gave me a careful, artful answer, which tells me he's not ready to say," said Sen. John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican. What it really means is that Trump doesn't care.
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There's one idea in the White House that Trump won't let go of: tax cuts. He's still talking about a payroll tax holiday, and possibly even more corporate tax cuts, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow told Fox Business. "Now, the package has not been decided. There's a brisk discussion going on in the White House," he said. There is not. Senate Republicans have already dismissed the idea of the payroll tax holiday because even Republican senators are smart enough to understand that there are 30 million fewer people on payroll to get that tax holiday as a result of the pandemic, and thus it doesn't accomplish anything other than taking money out of Social Security and Medicare coffers.
Trying to put a good face on the meeting, Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy said: "I'm not sure there was a main message. Oftentimes in the interview or speech you have a central message, but I'm not sure there was one. […] The president's conversations are wide-ranging." That's one way of putting it. Another way of characterizing Trump's conversations is “completely unhinged from reality.” Kennedy is one of the few Senate Republicans trying to address the crisis, though in a very limited way. He wants to allow more flexibility to states and cities for spending the $150 billion provided in the CARES Act, which is the relief bill that passed in March. The House bill has $1 trillion for states, territories, counties, cities, and towns that have seen revenues plummet during the crisis.
One senator used Trump's vague words on the crisis to project his own agenda. Sen. Lindsey Graham has been railing for weeks about all the freeloaders who are going to be so excited to be unemployed because their benefits will have a $600/week bonus. Graham—who is leading the charge to infect and kill the low-wage work force—believes that this is going to make people refuse to go back to work, and he says Trump is on his side. "He agrees that that is hurting the economic recovery," Graham told reporters after the lunch. "He agreed that was a problem we needed to look at." Trump likely had forgotten, if he ever knew, that this was a thing. He probably just agreed with Graham to get him to shut up.
All of which is to say the Senate Republicans' meeting with Trump was more about the bogus Obamagate and shoring up the Republican base ahead of November's election. Which is not going to sit well when we hit 200,000 dead Americans and 20% or 30% or 35% unemployment.