Loeffler adds fuel to Trump’s dumb tirade

While most of the attention on Donald Trump’s bizarre video threatening to blow up the coronavirus relief/government spending deal has been focused on the $2,000 direct payments he’s demanding, there’s the other, stupid, part. Leave to it Georgia Republican Kelly Loeffler to seize on the stupid. “I certainly support redirecting any wasteful spending to be very targeted at families and businesses who have been impacted by this virus through no fault of their own,” she said in Georgia, when asked about Trump’s statement. Pressed on whether that meant she’d vote for $2,000 relief checks, she hedged: “I’ll certainly look at supporting it if it repurposes wasteful spending toward that, yes.”

So about that “wasteful spending.” The stupid part. “It’s called the COVID relief bill,” he railed, “but it has almost nothing to do with COVID.” That’s because this bill is linked to the larger government spending bill, which includes foreign aid funding—and $1.4 trillion to fund the federal government for the remainder of the fiscal year. “This bill contains $85.5 million for assistance to Cambodia, $134 million to Burma, $1.3 billion for Egypt and the Egyptian military, which will go out and buy almost exclusively Russian military equipment, $25 million for democracy and gender programs in Pakistan, $505 million to Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama,” Trump complained. All of which was what the Trump administration asked for in its funding request for 2021. Trump not only had no idea what was in his budget proposal, he seems not to comprehend that none of this is supposed to be COVID relief, that he’s looking at two separate bills. Because why would he comprehend any of that? But Loeffler should know better, and probably does.

She’s trying to answer two masters here, Trump and McConnell, and doing it poorly. Because of course she is, why would she do any better? It’s not like she’s trying to be an actual public servant.

She’s got to go. Please give $3 right now to send her, and the GOP Senate packing.

We need all hands on deck to win the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5, and you can volunteer from wherever you are: More than 23,000 Daily Kos volunteers already have. Click here to see the Georgia volunteer activities that work best for you.