Donald Trump says he “won’t be extorted” by Democrats to reopen the government, making clear that he has no plans to negotiate as the government shutdown will soon enter its sixth week.
In an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday, Trump said that Democrats who are demanding an extension in health care subsidies “have lost their way” and predicted that they will eventually capitulate to Republicans who have said they won’t negotiate until they vote to reopen the government.
“I think they have to,” Trump said. “And if they don’t vote, it’s their problem.”
Trump’s comments signal that the shutdown could continue to drag on for some time as federal workers, including air traffic controllers, are set to miss additional paychecks and as there is uncertainty over whether 42 million Americans who received federal food aid will be able to access the assistance. Senate Democrats have now voted 13 times against reopening the government, insisting that they need Trump and Republicans to negotiate with them first on an extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies that are set to expire at the end of the year.
Finish the sentence, buddy. Extorted to do what exactly?
Oh that’s right, reduce people’s healthcare premiums by 300%
Edit: just to be completely accurate, premiums have gone up by ~300% because the subsidies ended. Bringing them back will bring that back down.
It’s really more that they’re trying to “extort” him into not raising premiums. The Democrats aren’t trying to strongarm reduced prices; they’re trying to stop price gouging.
On a longer timeline, they’re “extorting” him into not killing a few million people. And he’s throwing a temper tantrum and refusing to allow anybody to get in the way of this easily preventable mass death.
Even if a person is so heartless that they don’t give a shit about that and only cares about money, that’s gonna lead to fewer workers, fewer purchasers of goods and services, and less free time to enjoy purchases. So even the inhuman sludge monsters of capitalism should see that this is gonna be bad for business and be against this. There’s literally zero benefit to doing this if you look beyond the current financial quarter unless your goal is to destroy the country and hurt people.
It’s like shitting diarrhea all over the birthday cake so it can all be yours, but it’s your own fucking birthday party. The art of the deal.
Unfortunately, capitalism demands that MY employees have no free time, to keep the quarterly numbers up, but everyone else’s employees need to have free time, to spend money.
I mean the Trump admin and their backers are pretty clearly oligarchic. I would argue that oligarchy is one of the later states of capitalism, but ultimately they don’t care about economic spending; they care about maintaining or further consolidating their monopolies and monopsonies. Amazon doesn’t care that their profits will fall, they care that they are the only middleman between America and the broader world, whether that be through goods or the internet. It doesn’t matter if their workers can’t afford their stuff; the goal is to be the only source, where their workers have no choice but to afford it. “That’s not how economies work!” OK nobody said these people were sane, just that this is what they think.
Sorry to be that guy. But they’re not wanting to reduce premiums by 300%. That would make premiums -200% of what they were before. They want to reverse the increase of 300%. Which is actually a reduction of 75%.
They went up by 300% so re-enabling the subsidies would reduce it back to 0.
And releasing the Epstein files
“Are we still talking about that guy???”
No, we’re talking about who his clients were
More tariffs on an ally? Rape someone? He’s such a zany wildcard