The SAVE Trump Act: Only Mostly Dead

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I was getting a haircut yesterday. My “stylist” — a woman in her late twenties, whom I’ve known for several years — recently married and took the surname of her new husband. We always talk politics — although I’ve noticed that just about no one else there ever does — so she told me that her birth certificate is in her maiden name and she doesn’t have a US passport. She said she’d voted in every election since reaching voting age in 2016, using the mail-in ballots that California sends out to its registered voters. 

She was worried about being able to vote in November and asked what I thought the chances were of the SAVE America Act passing and forcing her to obtain one or the other of those documents in order to vote in the midterms.

I told her “not zero.” She stopped snipping, put down the scissors, looked off into space.

Mostly Dead Ain’t All Dead

You’ve likely heard many times since Donald Trump reoccupied the White House that the SAVE America Act — originally just the SAVE Act and more accurately the SAVE Trump Act — was “dead.” It “didn’t have the votes” in the Senate, where the Democrats were united against it and four Republicans had also gone thumbs down. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) was very clear about that, stating it over and over again.

But, like Westley in The Princess Bride, it seems that Save Trump is only “mostly dead” and can still be revived with a chocolate-coated resurrection pill, if the president can only twist enough GOP arms out of their sockets.

Trump’s latest attempt, if you didn’t know him and factor in the way he goes about his business, would have to be seen as politically bonkers. He abruptly canceled his scheduled triumphant signing of the bipartisan and wildly popular housing affordability bill (the stage was literally set, the desk polished and dusted, the pens in place, and the GOP luminaries clustered around crowing about their great success in saving the American Dream) until such time as the Senate found a way to ram through SAVE Trump. 

Housing? Unimportant! Trump actually told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), “Nobody cares about housing issues.” 

Well, maybe nobody living under the roofs of what’s left of The People’s House and the double-wide known as Mar-a-Lago! But a hell of a lot of other Americans do and, oh Lord, the optics, the optics! Donald Trump holding affordable housing hostage for his blatant voter suppression bill.

Trump doesn’t care about the optics. He’s post-optics, post-popularity, way post-popularity. All Trump cares about is power — his power, and his survival.

What’s It Gonna Be?

Trump can survive, hold onto power, as he is very fond of saying, “the easy way or the hard way.” 

The easy way, once upon a time, would have been to govern like a president rather than the creature from the green lagoon, hell-bent on personal and political vengeance, cruelties, and blowing things up at home and abroad. That easy way turned out to be way too hard for Trump.

The easy way, right now, is to put enough fat red thumbs on the electoral scales that his GOP congressional enablers survive the midterms with their House and Senate majorities intact. 

The hard way, if the easy way is thwarted, may well be the use of deadly force and regime-driven terror.

Winning a free and fair election is not among the options, as Trump sees it. 

Sure, he says the “real” polls show that he’s never been more popular but, if he’s that deluded, his finger shouldn’t be within a thousand miles of the nuclear button. 

I doubt he’s that deluded. For one thing, if he were that popular, he and his wholly-owned and operated party could just sail into those midterms with blithe confidence that all will be well. No need whatsoever for all that redistricting, let alone the SAVE Trump Act!

The Salvation Trump Sees in SAVE

Trump is obsessed with SAVE Trump for one reason: He’s terrified of the midterms and what will happen after. His real-world approval rating, ranging from the upper 30s to a new low of 30 percent, is in territory associated with massive midterm losses — he can look it up. He knows that, absent heavy red thumbs on the electoral scales — of which SAVE Trump is the heaviest — he’s toast, burnt toast. Free and fair midterms, should such be permitted, are looking every day like more of a lock to produce a Democratic tsunami, beyond rescue by any garden-variety October surprise.

And the other thumbs — redistricting, the tried-and-true conventional tactics of voter suppression, ICE at the polls — just aren’t heavy enough.

So from Trump’s POV, SAVE is trans-existential. Keeping millions of women, young people, old people, and poor people (especially poor people of color) from registering and voting — which is what SAVE would achieve — is mandatory if control of both House and Senate is not to change hands and Trump is not to face the inquiries and reckoning he could not withstand.

This is why Trump is absolutely, almost comically, fixated on SAVE — precisely because it games out to be so impactful and diabolical. 

That is because voting is a pure numbers game: What will this or that procedural “reform” translate to when the votes are tallied. If SAVE is only 10 percent effective in hitting its targets — that is, if pro-voting activists are spectacularly successful in flogging the other 90 percent in SAVE’s crosshairs to jump through SAVE’s flaming hoops to register and cast their votes — it would nevertheless suffice to flip the close elections that will determine control of Congress.

That is why Trump is so willing to do all sorts of apparently stupid things, like canceling the housing bill signing, to ram SAVE through. 

The Senate GOP’s Un-Synchronized Squirming

And why Thune, under enormous pressure to “find the votes,” is still, amazingly, hard at work on SAVE’s resurrection pill. 

It might take the form of attaching SAVE Trump to some must-pass military appropriations bill, coupled with the domestic cuts that would make the whole package revenue neutral and so qualify it — over the dead, or fired, body of Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough — as a “budget reconciliation” bill that can bypass the filibuster and pass with only Republican votes.

Or by attachment to the now-expired FISA Section 702 authorization, the renewal of which is considered essential to keeping us all safe from our myriad foreign and domestic enemies.

Or by nuking the filibuster altogether.

All of these stunts have proven highly distasteful to enough Republicans that SAVE Trump has failed over and over again.

But now Trump means business. 

SAVE Trump was worth torpedoing the affordable housing bill that embattled Republicans, dragged down by soaring Trump disapproval, were counting on as their signal accomplishment should any voters back home deign to ask what Congress, and their own representative or senator, had done for them lately. That is why the landmark bill passed 358 to 32 in the House and 85 to 5 in the Senate, truly remarkable margins for important legislation in the Late Trumpocene.

And SAVE Trump is worth twisting individual arms out of their sockets. It is, don’t you know, “a National Emergency.” At least to hear Trump tell it.

But… Hordes of illegal voters; Godless Communists taking over the country; Vandals, evidently wearing invisibility cloaks stolen from Hogwarts, knifing a 350-foot underwater gash in the beautiful lining of the Reflecting Pool: It’s all the same to a president who missed his true calling as a famous author of gothic fiction. As Dylan Thomas might have put it, “After the first lie, there is no other.”

Place Your Bets

So, although the Kalshi betting line for SAVE’s passage is still around 10 percent, Trump’s latest putsch notwithstanding, you shouldn’t be too surprised if you hear the popping sound several glenoid labrums make when several shoulders dislocate together as a “deal” is struck.

Senators, not counting Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Rand Paul (R-KY), don’t flip flippantly, so you can expect a kind of Memorandum of Understanding to accompany any sudden group change of heart: Concessions were granted; women voters will be protected; the anti-trans parts of the bill were scrapped; SAVE’s really been pared back to a nice, fair “voter ID” bill, which everyone wants; yadda yadda. 

And Iran promised not to even think about a nuclear weapon for [insert some big number here] years! Yes, that kind of bullshit fig leaf. At 10 to 1, there’s still a boodle to be made, if you go in for such things, on the prediction markets.

Thumbs on electoral scales are at least one step short of military takeover and deadly force when it comes to a grossly unpopular, roundly despised would-be dictator keeping his grip on power. But the dynamics are much the same, the slope of the graph. 

Trump’s desperate gambits to pass SAVE Trump may well foretell even more desperate gambits to hold onto power in the face of electoral defeat — if mere rigging doesn’t do the trick. That is my takeaway from this surrealistic SAVE dance.

And Trump is right: SAVE is a National Emergency. If the Senate GOP caves and finds a way to pass it, our last best chance to stop Trump’s mad tyranny and save American democracy may well wind up, as Miracle Max might put it, “all dead.”