Donald Trump hates democracy, housing bill edition
Republicans enraged the president by trying to listen to their constituents.
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Donald Trump hates voting and he hates democracy. This is not really in dispute. But just in case anyone forgot, he reminded us again last week when he unexpectedly and churlishly declared on Truth Social that he would not sign the ROAD to Housing Act which had passed with massive bipartisan support (358-32 in the House; 85-5 in the Senate).
“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” the president blustered.
The SAVE America Act, a massive voter disenfranchisement bill, is DOA in the Senate; it’s unclear it can even muster 50 votes for passage, much less the 60 needed to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Trump knows this, but he keeps trying to bully his own allies into submission.
Trump’s most recent assault caught Republicans completely flat-footed. Senate Majority Leader John Thune flailed when asked for a response (“I guess I would say at this point I don’t have any observations,” he said). Rep. French Hill was in a news conference when Trump announced the cancellation; unaware that the president had squashed the bill, he trumpeted it in glowing terms, saying “I’m proud of the work of the House and Senate to get people to ‘yes.’”
It’s fun to see the GOP clonking their heads together like rotting and rancid coconuts. But it’s less fun to see Trump’s utter disdain for the democratic process, even when that that process is endorsed by his allies and arguably helps him politically.
Trump’s authoritarianism is at the core of his orange, gaseous being, lodged so deep it even outweighs, at times, his all-consuming self-interest. If he has the choice between winning through democratic means and winning through dictatorship, there is no question that Trump would choose dictatorship every time.
The GOP gives persuasion a try
At the core of Trump’s disagreement with the House is a fight over midterm tactics. Republicans in Congress want to try to give their constituents a reason to vote for them by passing legislation — which is broadly how democracy is supposed to work. In contrast, Trump wants to disenfranchise anyone who won’t vote for the GOP — seizing victory through cheating rather than through persuasion.
The Republican Party as a whole is obviously broadly okay with cheating in many cases. State parties from Texas to Louisiana have been rushing to disenfranchise Black and brown voters through gerrymandering after the Supreme Court majority gave them the go-ahead. Voter suppression of non-white people (and for that matter of young people) has been a core Republican tactic for years, and really for decades. Trump is just building on the long GOP tradition of disempowering and subjugating voters rather than trying to persuade them.
Still, when their backs are truly to the wall, Republicans will occasionally try persuasion too. That’s the case with the ROAD to Housing Act.
Housing has been one of the biggest and most intractable aspects of the current affordability crunch. Prices on homes and rental units have been rising more quickly than inflation for a decade. There was an especially brutal jump during the height of covid from 2020 to 2022, when rents shot up by 24 percent and median home prices by 31 percent. Housing costs continue to be a record high share of household income, especially for low-income homeowners and middle-income renters.
The Road to Housing Act is the most substantial housing legislation in 30 years, according to many experts. It takes a number of important steps to address the housing crisis, including streamlining the federal housing inspection process, changing regulations for manufactured housing which could reduce costs by $5,000 to $10,000 per unit, and providing grants and loans to refurbish old homes and vacant buildings into new housing.
No one believes this will solve all housing supply or affordability problems, but it is a good faith effort to begin an investment in long-term change. That’s rare in this Republican-led Congress, which is one of the least productive in history; its only real accomplishments are wildly unpopular tax cuts for the wealthy and billions in funding for ICE, Trump’s increasingly unpopular immigration enforcement gestapo.
When the GOP goes to their constituents, they don’t have much to tout but war, inflation, and wealthy assholes getting richer. The housing bill was a small effort to change that. But a small effort is better than none.
Trump has no interest in persuading anyone
Trump has made clear he wants to win the midterms. Among other things, he’s worried that Democrats will investigate his (massive) corruption and illegality, and that as a result he might face legal consequences.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson warned Republicans just last week that if his party loses the house, the evil Democrats will go after “the president’s family, the cabinet, his donors and friends.”
Trump has even said he wants to “cancel” the midterms to prevent Democrats from taking over Congress.
If you are so afraid of losing that you want to cancel elections altogether, you think you’d be willing to sign a bill that might give you a better chance of winning in case the canceling thing doesn’t pan out. But that’s not how Trump’s mind works.
It’s been clear for a decade and more now that Trump holds voters in contempt and thinks any effort to try to improve their lives, or seek their votes, is boring, demeaning, and generally beneath him. He’s claimed that voting was rigged every time he’s run — even when he wins. In 2024, before the election, he boasted, “I actually tell our people, we don’t need your vote.”
Even if you ignore Trump’s attempted coup (and you should not ignore the attempted coup), it’s clear he believes elections are fundamentally illegitimate. His ideal election is one in which no one votes — not even his supporters — and he is simply crowned on the basis of his intrinsic greatness and/or his unique connection to the volk, whom he hates.
You can hear his sense of entitlement, and his hatred of the rabble, in his brief explanation of why he might veto the housing bill.
“Look,” he said, “I made billions of dollars with housing.” (He did not.) “I know housing better than anybody maybe anywhere. It’s all about the interest rate … I don’t want to hurt people that own houses too.”
Trump dislikes the housing bill because he feels it infringes on his own expertise and brilliance — and also because it might actually help the little guy by lowering prices, whereas he identifies with real estate oligarchs and landlords and worries about reducing their profits.
Rather than trying to help people he despises, Trump prefers robbing them of a voice. Thus his attempt to bully the GOP into passing his SAVE America Act, which he claims will eliminate (nonexistent) voter fraud. Really, though, the act is a massive disenfranchisement bill, which, among other provisions, requires people to have a passport or birth certificate to register to vote and establishes criminal penalties for election officials who mistakenly register an applicant. It would prevent millions from casting ballots. Among those most affected would be people without passports and married women whose names don’t match those on their birth certificate.
Married women are disproportionately Trump voters — so are rural voters who would have trouble with many provisions of the bill. Analyst G. Elliott Morris has argued that the bill could actually hurt the GOP in some states or areas. This is probably why the Senate has been reluctant to pass it; Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska certainly seems to think it would disenfranchise many of her own voters.
Trump, though, as a moral matter, refuses to know anything he doesn’t want to know. He only listens to the one hectoring voice in his hairless skull, and that voice tells him that elections are for weak, worthless baby men. Real dictators don’t care about policy; they win by cheating. He doesn’t want to be a weak worthless baby man; he wants to cheat. The SAVE America Act is the way. Any other approach, especially one which involves trying to help voters, enrages him. He throws a tantrum. He refuses to sign the bill.
A president who hates democracy is bad
It’s not clear what happens next with the Road to Housing Act.
As The New York Times explains, there are various possible outcomes. Trump could veto the bill, at which point Congress would have to try to override it. That should be possible given the huge margins for passage, though some Republicans might shy away from defying the president.
Alternately, Trump could give up and sign it. Or Trump could do neither and if Congress stays in session for 10 days, the bill becomes law. (If Congress doesn’t stay in session, things get complicated.)
It seems fairly likely that the bill passes somehow; Congress is enthusiastic about getting it across the finish line, and Trump doesn’t seem to care all that much. Whether it does or doesn’t, though, Trump has proven once again that he loathes both the democratic process and the people who he is, in theory, supposed to serve.
It would be good to have more affordable housing. It would also be good to have a president who didn’t hate us.
That’s it for today
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Is there anyone left who’s shocked by the churlish, childish behavior of Donald Trump?