The Daily 202: Missing from the ‘American Rescue Package’ debate? Donald Trump.

On the eve of President Biden’s first prime-time national address, a celebration of his $1.9 trillion economic rescue package, former president Donald Trump weighed in forcefully. Not about the legislation, a monumental Democratic victory.

“I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 (often referred to as the China Virus) Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!” Trump said Wednesday in an emailed statement.

A few hours earlier, the political fortunes of former NFL running back Herschel Walker — and avenging the stinging GOP defeats in Georgia’s Senate races in January — were foremost on Trump’s mind. “Wouldn’t it be fantastic if the legendary Herschel Walker ran for the United States Senate in Georgia? He would be unstoppable, just like he was when he played for the Georgia Bulldogs, and in the NFL. He is also a GREAT person. Run Herschel, run!” Trump said.

No longer trailed by a news media “pool” that can reach billions around the world in an instant, banned from Twitter and his tens of millions of loyal followers, the former president has mostly turned to emailed statements that often mimic the incendiary, grievance-filled tone of his rapid-fire social media notes.

But as Biden and his narrow Democratic majority muscled what may be the most progressive legislation in generations to passage, the political force he has dismissively dubbed the “former guy” was mostly absent from the debate.

Trump seems focused instead on political revenge for a personal election defeat he still has not formally acknowledged, and for the GOP loss of both chambers of Congress. In doing so, he’s ensuring the war for the future of the Republican Party will continue unabated.

Trump just hasn’t been all that active on policy, a trait carried over from his days as president, when he let Congress take the lead on issues like confirming judges and crafting Republican tax cuts, arguably two of his most significant legacies. 

In December, when Republicans still controlled the Senate, Trump made a foray into pandemic stimulus spending – waiting until after legislation had passed to push for raising direct payments to $2,000. 

In addition to egging on Walker, a friend who spoke at the 2020 Republican convention, Trump has spent his post-presidency thanking voters (Feb. 13) and denouncing McConnell. He has paid tribute to the late Rush Limbaugh (Feb. 17), and excoriated the Wall Street Journal editorial page over its analysis of the Democratic victories in Georgia’s Senate races (March 4). He promised on March 6 to campaign against Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska). He has called on Republicans to donate only to DonaldJTrump.com (March 8), and praised retiring Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) a day later. And he again pushed Republicans to save their political cash for DonaldJTrump.com (March 9).

His one policy-based statement was a March 5 attack on Biden’s “disastrous” handling of immigration, an issue about which he has always had a personal interest.

It’s unclear how much impact Trump would have had in the stimulus debate. Even with his silence, Republicans voted in lockstep against the legislation. Just one House Democrat joined them.

But he remains the most potent force inside the Republican Party, far more popular with its base than GOP leaders are, a magnet for political money, and front-runner for its 2024 presidential nomination.

“I’m tired of talking about Donald Trump, don’t want to talk about him anymore,” Biden declared at a mid-February CNN town hall. 

“For four years, all that’s been in the news is Trump. The next four years I want to make sure all in the news is the American people,” the president added.

For the most part, his White House has followed those marching orders, repeatedly indicating that the former president and his team have no standing to teach them anything.

On March 4, Biden press secretary Jen Psaki was asked whether the prior administration deserved credit for the campaign to vaccinate Americans against the coronavirus.

“I don’t think anyone deserves credit when half a million people in the country have died of this pandemic,” she told reporters.

A day later, she was asked about Trump’s statement about the situation at the southern border, which has seen a surge in immigrant crossings.

“We don’t take our advice or counsel from former President Trump on immigration policy, which was not only inhumane but ineffective over the last four years,” she said.  “We’re going to chart our own path forward.”

Biden’s prime-time speech — and his first news conference, expected later this month — will be the new president’s best opportunities to do just that.

The judge overseeing Derek Chauvin’s trial reinstated a third-degree murder charge in the death of George Floyd, paving the way for the trial to proceed as scheduled. “The decision was a victory for prosecutors who had sought to reinstate the charge against [Chauvin], the White officer filmed with his knee on Floyd’s neck,” Holly Bailey reports. “He is already charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter in the Black man’s death.”

Democratic leaders are urging Republicans to support two bills to expand background checks on gun purchases that are today poised for House passage. One bill would expand federal background-check requirements to private or unlicensed firearm sellers, while the other would close the “Charleston loophole,” which allows a person to purchase a firearm after three business days if a background check hasn’t been completed, Colby Itkowitz and John Wagner report. The efforts face longer odds in the Senate.

• “Hundreds of minors are crossing the border each day without their parents. Who are they?” by Nick Miroff, Andrew Ba Tran and Leslie Shapiro: “The U.S. refugee office of the Department of Health and Human Services has more than 8,500 minors in its shelters this week. An additional 3,500 are stuck in Border Patrol stations waiting for beds to open up. Each day, an additional 500 or more arrive, a threefold increase since December, and nearly 700 arrived Wednesday, the latest figures show. If the climbing trend line continues, the Biden administration will take in record numbers of unaccompanied minors this month.” 
• “The lynching that Black Chattanooga never forgot takes center stage downtown,” by Chris Moody: “For many of Chattanooga’s Black residents, the city’s beloved pedestrian bridge isn’t an architectural beacon of the New South, but a painful reminder of the old: Before the Walnut Street Bridge became a tourist draw, it was a lynching ground. In 1893 and again in 1906, enraged White mobs hanged Black men from the bridge. … Now, more than a century later, Chattanooga is taking a major step to acknowledge its dark racial history. This spring, it will unveil a monument at the southern entrance of the bridge to honor Black victims of White supremacy.”

• “L.A. expects to receive $1.35 billion from the relief bill. Garcetti is ‘ecstatic,’ ” by the Los Angeles Times’s David Zahniser, Dakota Smith and Julia Wick: “‘Now, with this money, we can put that money back into the savings account,’ he said during his weekly COVID-19 briefing. ‘We can pay off the credit card. And any cuts we’ve made in critical services, we can restore.’ ”
• “With pandemic relief plan, Democrats try to spur Georgia to expand Medicaid,” by the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Greg Bluestein: “Republican leaders in Georgia have adamantly opposed expanding the program to cover more low-income adults, saying it would be too costly in the long run and deny state health officials flexibility. But the $1.9 trillion stimulus aims to make resistance harder by including an infusion of about $2 billion to the state to cover the full tab of Medicaid expansion for two years.”
• “When Disneyland reopens, it’s going to have even more of a privilege problem,” by SFGate’s Julie Tremaine: “When Disneyland reopens this spring, it’s probably going to be a lot harder for many to be able to go to the park, and not just because of the financial distress caused by the pandemic. Disney is designing a more expensive park experience. And something that was admittedly already a stretch — but a stretch within reach — is going to become harder to attain.”
• “Mexico set to legalize marijuana, becoming world’s largest market,” by the New York Times’s Oscar Lopez reports: “In Mexico, however, the bill has proved divisive. Critics say it is unlikely to make a serious dent in Mexico’s soaring rates of cartel-fueled violence, and argue that it is unwelcome in a country where nearly two-thirds of people oppose legalizing marijuana, according to recent polling.”

This is big: Our colleagues took a fresh, deep dive into one of the most significant issues driving the 2020 election in which Democrats recaptured the White House and all of Congress. They found that Republicans in a whopping 43 states have proposed 250 laws that would crack down on voting rights in ways that could benefit GOP candidates in future elections.

• The proposed measures “would limit mail, early in-person and Election Day voting with such constraints as stricter ID requirements, limited hours or narrower eligibility to vote absentee, according to data compiled as of Feb. 19 by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice. Even more proposals have been introduced since then,” Amy Gardner, Kate Rabinowitz and Harry Stevens report.
• While those behind the measures say they’re necessary “to shore up public confidence in the integrity of elections” after 2020, in most cases, Republicans are proposing solutions in states where elections ran smoothly. The measures are, instead, “likely to disproportionately affect those in cities and Black voters in particular.”
• Some of the bills in Democratic-controlled states have little chance of passage, but “many of the most restrictive proposals have surfaced in states where the GOP has a total hold on power, including Arizona, Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri and Florida.”
• About half of the provisions seek to limit mail voting. “One extraordinary proposal in Arizona would require mail ballots to be postmarked by the Thursday before Election Day, even if they arrive at election offices before polls close,” our colleagues report.
• And while early or absentee voting – methods nearly 85 million voters used last year – are the most targeted, some proposals would strain the overall election system, including one in Alabama that would “eliminate straight-ticket voting, which critics said is yet another example of a measure that would create longer [voter] lines.”

• In doing so, he’s taking on a new mantle as “crusader for the poor.” “… ‘Scranton Joe’ Biden, whose five-decade political identity has been largely shaped by his appeal to union workers and blue-collar tradesmen like those from his Pennsylvania hometown, will sign into law a $1.9 trillion spending plan that includes the biggest antipoverty effort in a generation,” writes the New York Times.
• More: “The new role as a crusader for the poor represents an evolution for Mr. Biden, who spent much of his 36 years in Congress concentrating on foreign policy, judicial fights, gun control and criminal justice issues by virtue of his committee chairmanships in the Senate. For the most part, he ceded domestic economic policy to others,” the Times reports,
• What: The stimulus is “projected to reduce the poverty rate by one-third, the Urban Institute estimates,” New York Magazine’s Sarah Jones reports.
• “The think tank originally estimated that around 13.7 percent of U.S. households would be in poverty for the year 2021; the new stimulus package would take that rate down to 8.7 percent. It would reduce child poverty by half. People of color will benefit the most, they added,” Jones writes. “The ARP reverses a tired old dogma: Bet on households at the top, and the rest of the economy will benefit. Cut their taxes, and they’ll create more jobs, and a bit of wealth will eventually trickle down. Instead, the [stimulus] invests in the poor.”

• The party is now describing the package as “an anti-poverty measure with few precedents in U.S. history,” Erica Werner reports. “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) described the legislation as potentially more consequential even than the Affordable Care Act in its impact on poverty in America.”
• Hypocrisy alert: Just hours before the bill passed, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker (Miss.) tweeted approvingly about the bill’s $28.6 billion earmarked for “targeted relief” for restaurants. He left one little detail out — that he voted no on the package, just like all his GOP colleagues. “I’m not going to vote for $1.9 trillion just because it has a couple of good provisions,” he later said, per the Times.

“Sorry and stamina, defiance and despair” is the title of The Post’s special report on how we’re coping as a country 12 months into a the historic coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 525,000 people in the United States and radically upended everyone’s lives. “For most people, March 11 was when the covid-19 crisis first became real. It was the day of a high-profile diagnosis, major event cancellations and an official designation: pandemic,” Reis Thebault, Tim Meko and Junne Alcantara report this morning.

• Key quote: “Over the next 12 months leaders bungled opportunities to quell its spread, case levels rose, fell and rose again, hope endured, and more than 525,000 people lost their lives,” our colleagues write.
• This isn’t over: “After a year, more than 50,000 new infections are still being reported each day. But some people are acting as though the pandemic has ended — gathering in crowds, tossing masks into burning trash cans. Meanwhile, experts repeat familiar warnings: Beware another surge. There is hope and there is division, clarity and confusion. America ends one year living with a pandemic, unsure what the next will bring.”
• The virus drove a record U.S. death rate in 2020, the Centers for Disease Control will announce in an upcoming report. The death rate “increased by 15 percent last year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, making it the deadliest year in recorded U.S. history,” Politico reports. The CDC “will summarize its findings in an upcoming issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Its analysis will detail the rates at which U.S. residents of various races and ethnicities died as a result of the virus as well as the total number of deaths in each demographic group.”  

• “Momentum is beginning to gather for what might become Congress’s second big piece of legislation in the Biden era: a bill aimed at countering China’s economic influence,” Jeff Stein and Jeanne Whalen report. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) is behind the effort that “seeks to counter China’s rising global power and proposes funding aimed at bolstering U.S. manufacturing and supply chains, among other measures.”
• Schumer’s proposal could fulfill Biden’s and moderate Democrats’ goal of legislating across party lines, since numerous Republican senators have co-sponsored bills with Democrats on a range of China-related Issus.

“What do we say to America? Help is on the way,” Schumer said after signing the relief bill. 

Japan is commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima disaster. Chico Harlan, our correspondent in Japan at the time, recounts the day that changed everything: “The earth convulsed for a full six minutes. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake actually shoved Japan’s main island several feet to the east. The resulting tsunami, 40 feet high in some places, caused nuclear meltdowns and killed 20,000 people. Some bodies were never found.” 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) attacked Austin’s Democratic Mayor Steve Adler over a mask mandate.  Austin Democrats refused to end mask mandates in the city and its surrounding Travis County even as a statewide mandate lifted yesterday. In response, Paxton threatened to sue for defying a statewide moratorium on rules forcing Texans to don face masks, Katie Shepherd reports. “City/County leaders must not be thinking clearly,” Paxton said in a tweet. “Maybe it’s oxygen deprivation from quintuple-masking.”

Michael Cohen said he met with New York prosecutors for the seventh time. Trump’s former personal attorney met with Manhattan’s district attorney as its investigation of Trump’s taxes and finances intensifies, NBC News reports. “Cohen says he spoke with lead investigator Mark Pomerantz, an expert on white-collar crime who put away mob boss John Gotti and other organized crime figures.”

Biden will address the nation from the East Room at 8:02 p.m. 

Senate Democrats will today try to advance the nominations of two of Biden’s more controversial nominees, Xavier Becerra as secretary of health and human services and Deb Haaland as secretary of interior.

Merrick Garland will be sworn-in as attorney general today by Harris at 5:15 p.m. Garland will be briefed today on the investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, “then meet with staffers in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office assigned to the case, fulfilling his vow to make responding to the attack his No. 1 priority,” Matt Zapotosky reports.

Harris will also swear in Michael Regan as EPA administrator, making him the first Black man to lead the agency. 

All living former U.S. presidents (except one) are urging Americans to get the vaccine in a new ad series: 

So that settles it, then: Prince William said the royals are “very much not a racist family” in his first response to Oprah’s interview with Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex:

And Stephen Colbert thinks Republicans were forced to bring back the culture wars because Biden makes a terrible boogeyman: