Trump refuses to sign his own party’s housing bill

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (0:01)
Trump thumps his nose at his own voters by refusing to sign the housing bill that he promised them on the campaign trail. And I interview historian Heather Cox Richardson about the threat to democracy that we're contending with right now. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie.
Trump just torched his own campaign promise in writing on his own social media platform and somehow made it sound like a badge of honor. So he wrote, quote, I will not sign the housing bill which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House in protest over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing the Save America Act, which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party and very high with the non-politician Democrats. And he goes on, but I think you can already glean from that gem what the rest of it sounds like. So here's the deal. The housing bill passed the House 358-22 and passed the Senate 85-5. These are numbers that are so lopsided, they are basically unanimous by DC standards. On an issue that Trump literally ran on. Like over and over again, on the campaign trail, he said this.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:03)
We will open up new tracks of federal land for large scale housing construction so that we can get housing on the market. Housing affordability crisis. It's too expensive to build the homes and they're building them and they cost a fortune.

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (1:15)
Cut to, Congress delivers him exactly that, a sweeping genuinely bipartisan housing package meant to lower prices, speed up home building and rein in the corporate landlords buying up single family homes. And the second it lands on his desk, he shoves it. At which point there is a new tune that he's singing.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:33)
What are your plans for the housing bill, Mr. President? I don't know.
I think it's so unimportant by compare to the save America.

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (1:42)
And why? Why sink your own legislative achievement? Why undermine your own promise to your own voters? Because he wants to use it as a hostage to force through an unrelated bill. He is holding your housing cost hostage for political leverage for himself.
Now, Trump is going to claim that the Save America Act is about voter ID. It's not. At its core, this bill is federal control over how all 50 states register and verify voters, a nationwide proof of citizenship mandate, forcing states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, a functional end to mail-in voting outside of just a narrow list of exceptions.
So this would amount to the federal government consolidating authority that has sat with the states for the entire history of this country and putting in the hands of an administration that's already shown exactly what it wants to do with that power. And in case there's any doubt, Trump is so ham-handed that he outright admitted it.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:34)
We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for a hundred years.
We do that, we're not going to lose an election for a hundred years.

**Brian Tyler Cohen** (3:03)
Yeah, so nobody who genuinely believes in fair, secure elections tells you that the payoff is a hundred years of uninterrupted victory. Like, that's not a security measure, that is a permanent lock on power. When the architect of a massive voter suppression bill tells you the point is that his side stops losing, believe him. And that really is the whole story here. Trump is not gearing up to win the midterms on the merits, on the economy that he broke, on wars that he restarted, on promises that he shredded. He knows he can't. His own approval numbers and the inflation numbers and his mounting scandals, all of that shows that he does not have a winning midterm message to run on. So instead of making a case to voters, he's just trying to rig the rules of the game before a single vote is cast. He's looking to gut the filibuster, nationalize election administration, restrict the very ballots that tend to favor the party that he is opposing, and do it all under the friendly branding of election integrity. When a president would rather blow up his own party's housing than let a real election happen on a level playing field, that tells you that he's not preparing to win the midterms. He's preparing to make sure that it doesn't matter whether or not he does.