Will Senate GOP Kill Filibuster to SAVE Trump?

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Donald Trump is up shit creek and searching madly for a paddle. 

The polls — he’s underwater on just about every policy, sinking steadily deeper in overall approval, and at or near a truly remarkable 50 percent strong disapproval — tell only part of the story.

He has also run headlong into resistance everywhere from the streets of Minneapolis to the glaciers of Greenland to the once-reliable bench of the US Supreme Court and halls of Congress. 

And, never one to take NFW for an answer on anything he wants, he keeps doubling down and making things worse for himself — and for America.

Delusion can carry a blustering bully and charlatan like Trump surprisingly far, but it has its limits, which the president finally seems to have reached. 

Even in the Information Age, with social media at his service, Trump is finding that that other great president, Abe Lincoln, was right when, according to some accounts, he said:

You cannot fool all of the people all of the time. 

In fact, Trump can’t hope to fool all of the people ever, and even some of the some of the people he could fool all of the time — his precious MAGA base — seem to be wising up. 

Things stink right now for a whole lot of Americans, and Trump is fresh out of scapegoats. Sleepy Joe Biden is looking more and more like a speck of innocent roadkill, way back in the rearview mirror.

The investor class sees through Trump, and the noninvestors are getting badly hurt… Without divine or diabolical intervention, Trump and his party are going to get smoked and charred in the midterms.

Epstein, rampant corruption, and his own increasingly erratic and unhinged behavior aside, here’s Trump’s political problem in a nutshell: Voters wealthy enough to have significant stock market investments are likely to be intelligent, informed, and generally perceptive enough to see this edition of Trump as the dangerous, tyrannical loose cannon that he is. Meanwhile, his still-blindfolded MAGA cult members are unlikely to be stock market beneficiaries and are feeling real economic pain — which they are finally beginning to associate with Trump’s cruel policies and whims.

So, as he continues to slash the safety net and pursue reckless tariff policies in a rolling fit of infantile, narcissistic presidential pique, the stock market, even if the Dow stays at or near 50,000, won’t give him — or the Republicans facing slaughter in the midterms — much of a lifeline. 

The investor class sees through Trump, and the noninvestors are getting badly hurt.

Trump can rant till he’s blue in his normally orange face about fake polls and how popular and successful a president he really is, but even a master of self-delusion would at this point be waking up to a sobering political and electoral reality: Without divine or diabolical intervention, Trump and his party are going to get smoked and charred in the midterms.

SAVE to the Rescue?

Meanwhile, the gender gap keeps widening — symbolized recently by the respective State of the Union attendance and nonattendance of the gold medal-winning US men’s and women’s hockey teams. 

Counterintuitively, this widening gap might just give Trump his paddle, a diabolical line of attack, if only he can get his Senate majority on board to pass the SAVE America Act, with its potential to disenfranchise tens of millions of married (and divorced) women voters in November. 

Why is that such a big deal? Because women voters are now breaking better than four to three for the Democrats on the generic congressional ballot. And because of the double-digit gender gap in the 2024 presidential election — when men went for Trump over Kamala Harris 55 to 43 percent, while women gave Harris a 53 to 45 percent win. 

With the midterms manifestly shaping up as a referendum on Trump, the suppression of women voters — along with other targeted constituencies such as students, the elderly, and anyone with a name that might be mistaken for an undocumented immigrant’s — holds out what little hope there may be for Trump and the GOP. 

SAVE — slyly put forth by Republicans as a “voter ID” bill, voter ID being a popular idea — is a super-potent targeted voter suppression bill in disguise. Unfortunately, however, that is still far from common knowledge.

Related: Saving Our Democracy Means Stopping the SAVE Act

A Filibuster in the Ointment?

SAVE can’t pass unless Senate Republicans first decide to nuke the filibuster — which both parties have steadfastly declined to do when they’ve had the opportunity, even when doing so would have cleared the way for the passage of hotly desired legislation. 

That reticence derives mainly from the recognition on the part of the majority party that, when the pendulum swings, it will find itself in the minority and reliant on the filibuster to block legislation it opposes. 

So Trump is applying relentless pressure on Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) to come up with the votes to take that drastic step, claiming that passing SAVE will mean that for 50 years Republicans will “never lose a race.”

Trump is essentially making the case that the passage of SAVE transcends all institutional and long-term considerations, that it is the path to a permanent majority, such that Republicans shouldn’t even have to worry about ever having to rely on the filibuster again — at least not for 50 years.

The flip side of that coin, occasionally spoken out loud by Trump, is that he fears that failure to pass SAVE will usher in his demise — savage investigations into his corruption and lawlessness initiated by the new Democratic congressional majority, leading inevitably to yet another impeachment in the House and potentially even a Senate vote to strip him of his office, the third time being perhaps the charm.

If they do hold firm against nuking the filibuster, we can conclude that even the Party of No Principle would rather take a massive electoral hit than come to Trump’s rescue by handing him a paddle.

Trump’s desperation was evident in Tuesday’s SOTU address to Congress, in which he demanded passage of SAVE as Congress’s top priority, backing up his bluster with the classically projective howler that Democrats oppose SAVE because their policies are so bad that “the only way they can get elected is to cheat” — ostensibly via massive voting by “illegal aliens.” (Just to be clear, both Republican and nonpartisan task forces have searched intensively for decades without finding more than a literal handful of noncitizens voting or attempting to vote, out of billions of ballots cast. There isn’t even so much as a slender reed under this one, and the whole thing would make Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll’s head spin.)

But what makes this situation particularly fraught, and politically interesting, is the dilemma Senate Republicans are now facing.

If the Senate Republicans continue to withstand the extraordinary presidential pressure to nuke the filibuster in order to ram SAVE through, there’s an excellent chance the GOP will find themselves in the minority in at least the House and quite possibly the Senate come next January. SAVE has that much potential to tilt the electoral tables.

What Does Keeping the Filibuster Signify?

There is little question that, behind closed doors, most of the GOP congressional leadership and rank and file despise Trump and now — with a virtually unbroken string of Democratic electoral victories and whopping overperformances to drive home the point — regard him as a political albatross cast in bronze. 

But electorally, of course, their short-term interests align perfectly with the president’s: Disenfranchising women voters can save their seats. And, once they are saved, they in turn can save him. 

What this means is that, if they do hold firm against nuking the filibuster — which now seems highly likely — we can conclude that even the Party of No Principle would rather take a massive electoral hit than come to Trump’s rescue by handing him a paddle. 

When Richard Nixon’s jig was up, a congressional delegation walked over to the White House to bring him the bad news. Failing to nuke the filibuster for SAVE is a passive-aggressive version of the same embassy. 

While Trump would remain in office — with his finger much too near the nuclear button, with de jure command of the military, nurturing dubious schemes to take over elections via executive orders, and still uniquely dangerous — his political reign of terror would effectively be over.