At long last, Donald Trump has tired of winning. Last night, the president signed the COVID-relief and omnibus spending bill into law, averting both a government shutdown and an even longer lapse in funding for vital relief measures such as the Paycheck Protection Program. Americans will receive $600 checks from the federal government — the amount agreed to by Congress — and not the $2,000 Trump only saw fit to request after seven months of negotiation and the passage of a compromise agreement. Moreover, the foreign-aid spending requested by the Trump administration, provided by Congress, and then denounced by Trump himself also remained in the legislation.

Fear not, though: He’s not capitulating! After all, he issued a strongly worded signing statement asserting that “the Senate will start the process for a vote that increases checks to $2,000, repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud.” The statement has no binding power on Congress.

The situation can be summed up thus: The president delayed signing a much-needed COVID-relief and spending bill because it did not include something he had not requested, and did include items that his administration had asked for in its proposed budget for 2021. This saved Speaker Nancy Pelosi the trouble of being blamed for delaying the passage of a relief bill in a transparent effort to hurt his reelection campaign, something that she is guilty of and that Republicans would be talking about were they not being forced to convince the president not to “pocket veto” the bill.

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This marks the second time that the president has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory on this issue alone. In October, he announced that he was instructing his administration’s negotiators to halt discussions with Pelosi because she was being unreasonable, thereby taking the gun Pelosi had pointed at her own head out of her hands and aiming it at his own. If President Trump ever were a master of the art of the deal, that time has long since passed.