Senate Republicans provide a surprisingly potent sign of Trump's growing impotence

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/08/senate-republicans-provide-a-surprisingly-potent-sign-of-the-trumps-growing-impotence/#.XyhiEUBwvBg.link

I’m not sure what kind of game Steven Mnuchin is playing, but it’s pretty clear that it’s a game. Gross domestic product fell by nearly 10 percent in the second quarter, as all of us were forced to cut back on account of the novel coronavirus pandemic. The drop, according to the Times, was the equivalent of a 32.5 percent annual rate of decline, “the most devastating three-month collapse on record,” which wiped out five years of growth. All of this would have been worse without government stimulus.

If the president and the US Congress don’t want to see a depression that dwarfs the “Great” one that struck over 90 years ago, here’s what they must do next, according to economists interviewed recently by Businessweek: “a new round of direct payments, especially for those with low income; some extension of extra unemployment benefits; and a sizable chunk of aid to state and local governments,” which was missing from the last round of legislation. (The CARES Act appropriated some $150 billion for municipalities and states to fight Covid-19, but not to replace lost revenues.)

Yet here’s Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the United States Treasury, appearing on ABC’s “This Week” sounding as if the future of his boss, Donald Trump, is less certain than the future of the Republican Party—as if the president’s reelection were already lost and the time had come to re-lay ideological grounds anticipating a President Joe Biden. “There’s obviously a need to support workers and support the economy,” Mnuchin said. “On the other hand, we have to be careful about not piling on enormous amount of debts for future generations. … In certain cases where we’re paying people more to stay home than to work, that’s created issues in the entire economy.”

His remarks set off familiar ideological flare-ups. Mnuchin is the son of a Goldman Sachs banker, a millionaire hundreds of times over. For a man of the idle rich to suggest it’s bad for people to get a buck more than they’d normally earn, even as they stand in line at food kitchens, is a slap in the face. But while ideological flare-ups are today getting the attention, something important is getting lost. Mnuchin is making this out to be a conventional inter-party fight between the Democrats and the Republicans. It’s not, though. It’s really an intra-party fight. And Trump is losing.

*snip*