Trump goes on rampage with pardons, veto threats and Covid denial

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, who last week broke with the President by recognizing Biden’s election victory.

And the President combined his gambit — a classic of Trumpian disruption — with a Machiavellian play that revealed his hope of disrupting Biden’s presidency and included a baseless claim he could still win a second term.

While he slammed millions of dollars stuffed in the bill for the arts, foreign aid and other issues, Trump failed to mention that his White House had loaded it with a tax break for business lunches at a time when many Americans are going hungry.

It is not unusual for the last throes of a tired, scandal-tainted presidency to stake out a sharp contrast with the energy and sense of mission of the next — it’s a natural condition of the constitutionally mandated transfer of power.

But the comparison is especially acute in 2020 at a time of national extremis, amid a once-in-a-century pandemic, a consequent economic disaster and an outgoing President maximizing the tools of his power for self-serving ends while denying the result of a fair election he lost.

Biden tries to fill the leadership vacuum

Biden on Tuesday made a fresh attempt to provide the kind of national leadership that has been the hallmark of Democratic and Republican presidencies for decades and has long been missing in Trump’s. That vacuum is especially in evidence over the pandemic and a Russian hack of the US government.

Biden warned that groundbreaking vaccines were in short supply and, despite the hype of Trump’s team, would take “many more months” to become available to most Americans. And in the kind of bracing message never adopted by Trump, he warned that tens of thousands more Americans will die.

“I’m going to tell you the truth. And here’s the simple truth: Our darkest days in the battle against Covid are ahead of us, not behind us,” the President-elect said in Wilmington, Delaware.

Biden also issued an unusually strong condemnation of an outgoing President by a President-elect over Trump’s absolution of Russia for a massive…