A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.MONDAY, AUGUST 10 , 2020
BY TOLUSE OLORUNNIPA
AND ASHLEY PARKERbedminster, n.j. — Already
largely absent from intense nego-
tiations for a coronavirus stimu-
lus package, President Trump ful-
ly distanced himself from the
thorny legislative process b y leav-
ing Washington on Thursday for
a weekend at his private golf
resort in New Jersey.
After talks on Capitol Hill col-
lapsed, Trump assembled some
of his dues-paying club members
to watch him complete the final
step of what has become a famil-
iar routine in his turbulent presi-
dency: signing a legally dubious
executive order after failing to
reach a deal with Congress.
The president who pitched
himself to voters as the consum-
mate negotiator and ultimate
dealmaker has repeatedly found
his strategies flummoxed by the
complexities and pressures of
Washington lawmaking. In re-
sponse, he has frequently relied
on s howmanship and pageantry
to try to turn negotiating failures
into victories.
“We’re going to be signing
some bills in a little while that are
going to be very important, and
will take care of, pretty much, this
entire situation,” Trump said Sat-
urday from his club’s grand ball-
room, surrounded by presiden-
tial seals, American flags and
news cameras.
He was greeted with raucous
applause by dozens of supporters
as he posed for pictures in a
simulation of a White House
signing ceremony after major
legislation is passed.
But the four documents the
president signed Saturday were
neither “bills” nor “acts,” despite
his comments referring to them
as such, and their effectiveness
and legality are already being
called into question by Demo-
crats and some Republicans in
the Congress he is attempting to
bypass.
Trump said the executive ac-
tions he signed would provide
economic relief to millions of
Americans by deferring payroll
taxes and provide temporary un-
employment benefits by repur-
posing unspent dollars. But
whether that relief will ever
reach Americans remains in
doubt, as Trump’s unilateral ac-
tions face legal and logistical un-
certainties.
The president’s inability to
reach a deal with Congress on a
payroll tax cut or an extension of
unemployment benefits under-
scored his underwhelming re-
cord as a presidential negotiator,
according to several historians
and lawmakers from both par-
ties.
“It’s pretty striking that other
than the December 2017 tax law,
basically all of the major moves
by the Trump administration
have been via executive action,
even though he had control of
Congress for half of the time,”
said Daniel Hemel, a professor at
the University of Chicago Law
School.
Republicans and Democrats
rejected Trump’s payroll tax cut
proposal, and the president was
unable to bring the two sides
together on a compromise over
extending enhanced unemploy-
ment payments after the $
weekly benefit expired last
month.
Instead, Trump signed an e xec-
utive memorandum that he said
would provide $400 in extra ben-
efits for Americans. The measure
itself is constitutionally suspect
— since Congress has authority
under the Constitution to appro-
priate funds — and also of ques-
tionable workability.
Under the measure, states
would h ave to p itch i n $100 week-
ly and set up a new mechanism
for delivering the funds. Several
governors, including Ohio’s Mike
DeWine (R), have said they are
not sure if they will be able to
participate in the program.
Trump’s executive order on
evictions also stops far short of
what he promised.
“We don’t want people beingevicted,” Trump said Saturday.
“And the bill — the act that I’m
signing will solve that problem,
largely — hopefully, completely.”
But the order does not rein-
state the federal eviction morato-
rium that expired last month.
Instead, it orders federal agen-
cies to “consider” whether a tem-
porary halt on evictions was nec-
essary and to identify potential
funds to help struggling renters.
Michael Steel, a Republican
operative who worked for former
House Speaker John A. Boehner
(R-Ohio), said Trump was effec-
tively “giving up on the legislative
process” and limiting his own
ability to achieve more lasting
influence.
“If you want to get big endur-
ing substantial change, you have
to go through Congress, as tortur-
ous as that process may be,” he
said, adding: “I worry he’s drink-
ing his own Kool-Aid, and that’s
the problem.”
Democrats slammed the exec-
utive measures as too limited and
accused Trump of failing to grasp
the weight of a pandemic that has
killed more than 159,000 Ameri-
cans.
“My constitutional advisers
tell me they’re absurdly unconsti-
tutional,” House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Sunday on
CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“What the president proposed
yesterday at his country club,
surrounded by his people that
must spend thousands of dollars
to join, is something that won’t
even work.”
Trump admitted Saturday that
reaching a more secure legisla-
tive agreement on unemploy-
ment compensation should have
been “easily” accomplished but
blamed Democrats for intransi-
gence.
“You ever hear the word ‘ob-
struction?’ They’ve obstructed.
Congress has obstructed,” Trump
said Saturday when asked if he
was setting a new precedent for
presidents to change tax and
spending policy without legisla-
tion. “The Democrats have ob-structed people from getting des-
perately needed money.”
White House press secretary
Kayleigh McEnany defended
Trump as a “great negotiator,”
pointing to previous coronavirus
relief bills that passed with bipar-
tisan support.
“President Trump successfully
negotiated three iterations of
COVID relief legislation, includ-
ing the landmark CARES Act,”
she said in a s tatement. “From t he
first drafting of the CARES Act to
enactment as law, it took one
week. This occurred under split-
party control of Congress.”
While Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.)
referred to the president’s ac-
tions as “unconstitutional slop,”
Trump received support from
some Republican allies who
praised him for taking action
amid a congressional logjam.
Some of the GOP leaders who
praised the president’s action
previously attacked President
Barack Obama for using execu-
tive action to bypass Congress.
“Look, as the president has
said, democracy is hard,” Senate
Majority Leader Mitch McCon-
nell (R-Ky.) said after Obama pro-
posed executive action on immi-
gration in 2014. “Imposing his
will unilaterally may seem tempt-
ing. It may serve him politically
in the short term. But he knows it
will make an already broken sys-
tem even more broken.”
On Saturday, McConnell
praised Trump’s use of executive
authority, saying in a statement
that the end run around Congress
was justified because Democrats
were being stubborn.
But with less than three
months to go before a presiden-
tial election, it’s unclear if voters
will agree with Trump’s partisan
and unilateral approach to prob-
lem-solving. The pandemic rag-
ing across the country and ravag-
ing the nation’s economy is the
kind of national challenge that
previous presidents have used to
rally lawmakers and the public to
unify.
In the past, Americans haverewarded presidents who rise to
confront national tragedies with
steady leadership, creative ideas
and political skills to bring two
opposing sides to agreement.
Trump has largely been absent
from that process, and his poll
numbers have fallen as the virus’s
death toll has soared.
Trump hasn’t spoken at length
to Pelosi since October, and the
relationship between the two
powerful figures has deteriorat-
ed in the wake of the House’s vote
to impeach the president last
year.
Trump’s signing ceremony Sat-
urday followed a pattern that has
become well established during
his first term. He has regularly
pivoted to signing executive or-
ders with great fanfare after fail-
ing to negotiate legislative deals
that would have broader and
more long-lasting impact. He of-
ten claims that his unilateral ap-
proach is actually better than the
legislation he originally sought
unsuccessfully.
Unable to reach an agreement
with Congress last year over
funding for his border wall,
Trump ended a 35-day partial
government shutdown by an-
nouncing that he would use exec-
utive action to repurpose money
for the project.
After failing in 2017 to pass a
bill to repeal and replace Obama-
care, Trump instead promised to
“use the power of the pen” to
provide alternative health-care
plans, which he has yet to do. On
Friday, he claimed he would
again a ddress health care by s ign-
ing an executive order requiring
health insurers to cover preexist-
ing conditions, something that is
already required under the Af-
fordable Care Act signed into law
by Obama.
Trump has repeatedly prom-
ised legislation to address gun
violence after mass shootings but
ultimately settled for an execu-
tive ban on bump stocks after
struggling to reach a bipartisan
compromise on background
checks or other changes support-ed by members of both parties.
After Congress and the White
House failed to come up with a
legislative package to address po-
lice misconduct in the wake of
national protests over racial in-
justice this summer, Trump used
a Rose Garden ceremony to sign
an executive order that left both
parties divided.
Trump’s repeated use of execu-
tive orders stands as a “devastat-
ing rebuke” of his central 2016
campaign message, said Jennifer
Palmieri, Hillary Clinton’s com-
munications director during the
2016 race.
“ It’s an admission that Trump
has failed as a dealmaker, which
in 2016 was his biggest selling
point for how he was going to fix
the economy and be effective
with Congress,” she said.
As a candidate in 2016, Trump
repeatedly criticized Obama for
signing executive orders and said
that he was a businessman with
the skills to cut through congres-
sional gridlock.
“We have a president that can’t
get anything done so he just
keeps signing executive orders all
over the place,” Trump said on
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in Janu-
ary 2016, adding that, he pre-
ferred “ the old fashioned way, get
everybody into a room and get
something people agree on.”
In the end, Trump’s legacy may
include the further erosion of the
system of checks and balances
envisioned under the Constitu-
tion, said Barbara A. Perry, a
presidential historian at the Uni-
versity of Virginia’s Miller Center.
“The Founders must be spin-
ning on their marble pedestals —
and not from protesters attempt-
ing to topple them,” she said in an
email. “The trend toward unilat-
eral executive orders, to avoid a
polarized and stymied Congress,
preceded President Trump, but
he has accelerated it to the point
of obliterating our bedrock con-
stitutional principle of checking
autocratic power.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Stymied by Congress, Trump repeats familiar routine of executive actions
BY ASHLEY PARKERShortly after a deadly explo-
sion in Beirut last week, President
Trump offered a theory — backed
by no apparent evidence — that
the devastating incident was “a
terrible attack,” claiming “some of
our great generals” thought it was
likely the result of “a bomb of
some kind.”
Such a bold proclamation from
a U.S. president would usually set
off worldwide alarms. Yet aside
from some initial concern among
Lebanese officials, Trump’s asser-
tions were largely met with a
collective global shrug.
More than 3½ years into his
presidency, Trump increasingly
finds himself minimized and ig-
nored — as many of his more
outlandish or false statements
are briefly considered and then,
just as quickly, dismissed. The
slide into partial irrelevance
could make it even more difficult
for Trump as he seeks reelection
as the nation’s leader amid a
pandemic and economic collapse.
In battling the coronavirus cri-
sis, which has left more than
158,000 Americans dead, many of
the nation’s governors have disre-
garded the president’s nebulous
recommendations, instead opt-
ing for what they believe is best
for their residents. So have the
nation’s schools, with many of the
country’s largest districts prepar-
ing for distance learning when
they reopen this fall, despite
Trump’s repeated calls for chil-
dren to return to classrooms in
person. And the president’s own
top public health officials are
routinely contradicting him in
public — offering grim, fact-based
assessments of the raging virus in
contrast to his own frequently
rosy proclamations.
Congressional Republicans,
meanwhile, never seriously en-
tertained Trump’s desire for a
payroll tax cut in the latest coro-
navirus stimulus bill, and the
president has been more of a
spectator than a key player in
negotiations. Even former vice
president Joe Biden, the pre-
sumptive Democratic presiden-
tial nominee, often seems to ig-
nore the president he is running
against, focusing his messaging
elsewhere.
Ian Bremmer, president and
founder of Eurasia Group, a polit-
ical consulting firm with a global
emphasis, said that when Trump
made his claim about the bomb in
Lebanon, much of the global com-
munity intuitively understood
that the president “is inclined to
think that of course it must be
terrorism because it’s the Middle
East and people blow up stuff up
there.”
“And so he said it, and it’s
stupid, but after almost four years
of Trump, we all kind of know that
he doesn’t really listen to experts
and briefings,” Bremmer said.
International leaders and dip-
lomats, he added, no longer find
themselves scrambling over every
Trump tweet and utterance, the
way they did early in his presiden-
cy. “They understand that a lot of
stuff that Trump says does not
remotely equate to policy and
they’ve had enough experience
with that to understand, most of
them, when you can just tune it
out,” he said.
Biden, meanwhile, has made a
core theme of his campaign the
argument that Trump’s lack of
credibility is eroding the presi-
dency, as well as the relevancy of
the United States on the world
stage. He has called the president
a “charlatan” and “a serial liar,”
and criticized his response to the
coronavirus, saying he should not
be listened to.
“He’s like a child who just can’t
believe this has happened to
him,” Biden said during a speech
earlier this summer.
At times, Biden has tried ignor-
ing Trump altogether — or, when
he does engage, doing so with atone of exasperated mockery.
“I can’t believe I have to say
this, but please don’t drink
bleach,” Biden wrote on Twitter in
April, after Trump suggested in-
jecting disinfectant as a means of
combating the coronavirus, in a
missive that became the plat-
form’s most-liked tweet that
week.
John Anzalone, Biden’s poll-
ster, said the strategy against
Trump works because “a superm-
ajority of people believe he’s a
liar, so he can come into the
Situation Room or he can come
into people’s living rooms and
they don’t believe him.”
That represents an electoral
weakness for Trump, Anzalone
said, making it harder for the
president to effectively diminish
Biden. Part of that, he said, is how
the public views Biden — as a
generally decent man — but part
of that is the president’s own
credibility deficit.
“His problem is that there’s
also a collective shrug when he
attacks Joe Biden,” Anzalone
said. “He attacks, attacks, attacks,
but people don’t believe his at-
tacks. They kind of eye-roll and
they shrug.”The White House press office
rejected the notion that Trump
now finds himself minimized on
a range of issues.
“While the radical left and the
D.C. Swamp continue to attack
this President, the American peo-
ple recognize his bold leadership
and commitment to putting
America First every day,” White
House spokesman Judd Deere
said in an email statement. “Pres-
ident Trump has proven over and
over again that he will not back
down from tackling the big chal-
lenges facing this country, in-
cluding defeating the China vi-
rus, rebuilding our economy, and
protecting this country.”
The deadly pandemic seemed
to hasten Trump’s troubles in
being heard. Many state and local
officials have implemented their
own strategies to combat the
virus, regardless of the presi-
dent’s desires and demands.
In early May, more than half a
dozen Eastern states announced
they were banding together to
buy medical supplies. This
month, another group of gover-
nors formed a bipartisan consor-
tium to address severe testing
shortages and delays.“If you’re a governor fighting
the coronavirus and you want to
get information out to the people
of your state, what is the value in
fighting Donald Trump?” said Lis
Smith, a Democratic consultant,
explaining the go-it-alone ap-
proach of some of the nation’s
governors. “If you’re amplifying
the president’s misinformation
on this virus, then you’re short-
changing the people of your
state.”
While Trump has repeatedly
expressed his desire that all stu-
dents return in person to school
this fall, a growing number of
school districts are openly defy-
ing his requests. Even St. An-
drew’s Episcopal School — the
private school in the Maryland
suburbs attended by Trump’s
youngest son, Barron — plans to
begin the school year with virtual
classes only.
The president’s own top public
health officials, meanwhile, are
increasingly contradicting him in
public. Speaking on CNN’s “State
of the Union” last Sunday — just
one day before Trump claimed
the coronavirus was “receding” —
White House coronavirus re-
sponse coordinator Deborah Birxwarned that the virus was “ex-
traordinarily widespread” in
“both rural and urban” areas.
And on Wednesday, as Trump
was repeatedly claiming at a
news conference that the virus
will “go away,” infectious-disease
expert Anthony S. Fauci told
CNN’s Sanjay Gupta that the
United States is faring poorly
compared with the rest of the
world. “The numbers don’t lie,”
Fauci said.
Similarly, Trump has played
only an ancillary role in the ongo-
ing discussions for a pandemic
relief package on Capitol Hill.
Senate Republicans almost im-
mediately rejected his desire for
another payroll tax cut, never
seriously entertaining the idea.
And in a seeming acknowledg-
ment of his inability to directly
shape the congressional negotia-
tions, Trump held a news confer-
ence Saturday at his private club
in Bedminster, N.J., to sign one
executive order and several mem-
oranda intended to provide eco-
nomic relief to millions of Ameri-
cans by providing temporary un-
employment benefits and defer-
ring taxes.
At a news conference the previ-
ous day, Trump also rejected the
idea that he is not deeply involved
in the stimulus conversations,
saying he is being represented
daily by his emissaries — Chief of
Staff Mark Meadows and Trea-
sury Secretary Steven Mnuchin —
and speaks with them frequently.
But a Republican Senate aide
likened the president to a sleep-
ing grizzly bear. “If you woke up
the grizzly bear, he could destroy
anything — but now he’s just
hibernating,” the aide said, speak-
ing on the condition of anonymity
to share a frank assessment of
Trump’s role in the relief package.
Smith, the Democratic consul-
tant who was also a senior adviser
to former D emocratic presiden-
tial candidate Pete Buttigieg, said
ignoring Trump was also an effec-
tive strategy for 2020 Democratic
hopefuls. The candidates who ran
campaigns that deliberately
didn’t engage with the president
generally fared better, she said.
And, she said, the novelty of
getting attacked by Trump — once
a badge of honor in some Demo-
cratic circles — has now worn off,
another sign the president is los-
ing some of his influence.
“At lot of politicians would pray
for Trump to attack them,” she
said. “But now, you see him going
after obscure Democratic county
officials and Z-list celebrities.”
She added: “It’s not worth dig-
nifying his attacks a lot of the
time.”
[email protected]Matt Viser contributed to this report.World increasingly shrugs at Trump’s outlandish claims
JABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POST
President Trump leaves an Aug. 4 coronavirus briefing. That day, after a deadly explosion rocked Beirut, the president mused that it was
probably the result of “a bomb of some kind.” His statement was quickly dismissed on the world stage.