BENEFITS

those five months, where would we have been?” he said. “It’s going to be difficult if the president doesn’t sign this bill.”

The bill awaiting Trump’s signature would also activate a weekly $300 federal supplement to unemployment payments.

Sharon Shelton Corpening had been hoping the extra help would allow her 83-year-old mother, with whom she lives, to stop eating into her social security payments to make their $1,138 rent.

Corpening, who lives in the Atlanta area, had launched a freelance content strategy business that was just taking off before the pandemic hit, prompting several of her contracts to fall through. She is receiving about $125 a week under the pandemic unemployment program and says she will be unable to pay her bills in about a month. This, despite her temporary work for the U.S. census and as an elections poll worker.

“We on the brink,” said Corpening, who lobbies for Unemployment Action, a project launched by the Center for Popular Democracy to fight for relief. “One more month, if that. Then, I run out of everything.”

Trump, meanwhile, has been spending his final days in office golfing and angrily tweeting as he refuses to accept his loss to Biden in the Nov. 3 election. On Saturday, he again lashed out at members of his own party for failing to join his quest to try to overturn the results of the election with baseless claims of mass voter fraud that have been repeatedly rejected by the courts.

“If a Democrat Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen, with proof of such acts at a level never seen before, the Democrat Senators would consider it an act of war, and fight to the death,” he railed. He said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his Republicans “just want to let it pass. NO FIGHT!”

Trump also lashed out at the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and the FBI as he seemed to encourage his supporters to gather in Washington on Jan. 6, the day Congress tallies the Electoral College vote — even though a similar event last month devolved into violence, with multiple people being stabbed in the capital’s streets.

In addition to freezing unemployment benefits, Trump’s lack of action on the bill would lead to the expiration of eviction protections and put on hold a new round of subsidies for hard-hit businesses, restaurants and theaters, along with money to help schools and vaccine distribution.

The relief is also attached to a $1.4 trillion government funding bill to keep the federal government operating.