There's not a dime for creating a safer and smoother election in the Senate Republican economic stimulus proposal — which has voting rights groups, democracy reform advocates and some election administrators professing outrage and frustration, but not panic just yet.
The roughly $1 trillion package, unveiled Monday and blessed by the Trump administration, is essentially the GOP's opening bid for negotiations with the Democratic House. It has voted for $3 trillion more in coronavirus recovery funds including $3.6 billion for states to make their November contest healthy, comprehensive and reliable despite the pandemic.
Securing significant aid for the states — mainly so they can accommodate a guaranteed surge in voting by mail — has become good-governance lobbyists' singular focus during the public health emergency. They remain cautiously optimistic the ultimate bipartisan deal this summer will include several hundred million beyond the $400 million they secured this spring, banking that the pleadings of election officials in many red states will outweigh President Trump's unfounded allegations about the fraudulent evils of mail voting.
Advocates have taken heart that some senior Republican senators, most notably Missouri's Roy Blunt, have publicly endorsed additional funding.
On the other hand, there is intensifying worry that — even if the states get more cash for printing, sending and then counting absentee ballots, plus hiring election workers and sanitizing polling places — the mail-in vote could still be chaotic and wholly unreliable if the Postal Service is unable to deliver tens of millions of envelopes on time.
"That would force people to risk their health to vote and virtually guarantees election chaos," said Robert Weissman, president of the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen.
The Senate GOP package is essentially silent on money to rescue the Postal Service from a financial crisis this fall, aid Trump also opposes.
On Tuesday, as details of the Senate GOP plan were being fully digested, advocates for election aid who position themselves as centrist and bipartisan remained essentially silent. That's a potentially strong signal these groups have confidence they'll get some of what they're after in the end, but only if they keep their rhetorical powder dry and don't do anything to antagonize Republican negotiators, particularly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Groups on the left, in contrast, sounded emphatic alarms and put the blame squarely on McConnell, who will have the power to sign off on every line item in the package
The country "is running out of time to protect our health and constitutional right to vote, and the Republican-controlled Senate is playing partisan politics with our democracy," said Jana Morgan of the Declaration for American Democracy, a coalition of 160 labor, civil rights, environmental, women's rights and good government groups. "McConnell and his Republican colleagues' blatant disregard for the safety of voters is appalling."
"Public health experts have made clear that the threat of coronavirus isn't going away anytime soon and it's unbelievable that the bill Mitch McConnell released today completely ignores the crisis we'll face if states don't have the resources they need to ensure every eligible voter has options to be able to safely cast a ballot this November," added Tiffany Muller of the progressive group Let America Vote.
It remains unclear how soon negotiations will produce progress on the bill, which will be the last major legislative response before the election to the historic economic and public health challenges spawned by Covid-19.
The Senate GOP plan, assembled after a week of internal party discord at the Capitol and mixed signals from the White House, is vastly different from the much more generous measure the House passed in May — before the virus started its summer surge and the economy started swooning again.
Tens of millions of Americans are on course to lose their enhanced jobless benefits this week, and the centerpiece of the Senate bill would slash by two-thirds what has been since April a $600-a-week unemployment payment. The House bill would keep the current benefit going until January.
The Senate bill also would provide tax cuts and liability protections for businesses, schools and hospitals, while the House bill would make the government bolster virus safety measures in the workplace.
House Democrats would allocate $1 trillion in general relief for cash-strapped state and local governments. Senate Republicans left them out of their bill altogether.
The main point of agreement is that both bills would provide a second round of $1,200 direct payments to most American families, although the two sides differ on some details.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.