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Trump calls on Congress to approve $2,000 stimulus checks

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump called on Congress to amend the COVID relief bill it recently approved to increase stimulus checks to $2,000 from $600 for individuals and $4,000 for couples.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: Let's start, though, with the stimulus deal, which has been passed by Congress and is awaiting President Trump's signature. Until last night, he said those stimulus checks in the bill are not large enough. Remember, there's $600. He says, no, they need to be $2,000. So what happens now? Our Rick Newman is joining us right now. President Trump has been pretty quiet throughout this whole process. He seems to be more fixated on what is going on with the election. And, actually, let's play a little bit of a sound of what he had to say about this whole situation.

- I am asking Congress to amend this bill and increase the ridiculously low $600 to $2,000 or $4,000 for a couple. I'm also asking Congress to immediately get rid of the wasteful and unnecessary items from this legislation and to send me a suitable bill, or else the next administration will have to deliver a COVID relief package. And maybe that administration will be me. The administration won't be him, to be clear. He had to throw that in there, didn't he? But, Rick, sorry about that. So is it even possible that Congress would go back to the drawing board and increase the stimulus checks?

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RICK NEWMAN: Well, one thing Trump did not say is that he's going to veto this bill. And he has said he would veto other bills. So it's possible, in fact, it's probably likely that this is just kind of an attention-getting stunt. He wants to remind everybody he's still there. Somebody should have told Trump that he could have asked for this $2,000 stimulus rather than $600 while Congress was actually negotiating the legislation. He actually does get a chance to have some say in what goes into this bill. Of course, he did not have much say. And his own treasury secretary was the one who advocated for the $600 payment.

So now Trump says he wants a $2,000 payment. Democrats have seized on this. They've said, OK, we can do this. We can raise that up to $2,000. However, the maneuvering by which that would happen is not likely to take place. So my best guess, Julie, is Trump bloviates and says this bill is terrible. But he either ends up signing it, or it ends up going into effect without his signature, which can happen. But I would say there's a 30%, 40% likelihood that this bill actually does not get passed. And it is plausible that if Trump does not get this done, then it sits around for a couple of weeks, and then Joe Biden does it as soon as he comes into office on January 20.

- Rick, I follow all of your work on the Trump administration. And you have gotten a large majority of it right. But you do concede in a new piece that that's about to hit Yahoo Finance, that you actually got one thing wrong. What was it?

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah. I mean it's only fair if you're a real Trump critic to go back and say, how did you do when you were predicting things would happen. I did predict Trump would lose almost a year ago, even before the pandemic. But once we had the pandemic, I thought Trump really was going to get walloped. I thought he was going to lose with perhaps only around 100 electoral votes. And that did not happen. We actually had a very close election.

Trump has a grip on a big chunk of American voters that is hard to explain. Presidents in recessions usually lose by a lot. And Trump did not lose by a lot. And he takes this following with him into his political afterlife, if you will, once he leaves office on January 20. So we're going to be dealing with Trumpism for a long time. And that's basically what the takeaway is here.

JULIE HYMAN: Yes, for better and for worse.