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Yesterday was an enormous day for earthquakes. Seismic activity rocked Japan and Northern California, but nowhere was hit harder than Venezuela, which suffered a devastating pair of quakes that leveled buildings and struck terror throughout the capital of Caracas and beyond. At least 164 people died in the quake, acting President Delcy Rodríguez said, and at least 971 more were injured.
In a grim way, Venezuela has one thing to be thankful for: After seizing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last year and handing power over to Rodríguez, President Donald Trump has moved Venezuela from his “enemies” to his “friends” list, and he is therefore in a giving mood. “The U.S.A. stands ready, willing, and able to help!” Trump wrote on Truth Social last night. “I have instructed all agencies of our government to get ready to move quickly. We will be there for our new and great friends.” Happy Thursday.
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Trump Shoots Another Legislative Hostage
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump has been flogging it for only about six months, but the Save America Act already has a chance to go down in history as the most consequential piece of legislation never passed. Faced with the cold reality that Senate Republicans just don’t have the votes for his elections wishlist bill, Trump has responded the only way he knows how: by squeezing harder.
Threatening to primary senators who won’t do what he wants is his go-to move, but lately he’s been doing even more—taking important bills hostage until the Save America Act reaches his desk.
As of yesterday, however, the president isn’t just blocking bills Congress wants passed. He’s even targeting bills that, at least on paper, are his own legislative priorities.
We’ve written a few times this year about the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bill that took a number of reasonable steps toward addressing America’s ongoing acute housing shortage through a combination of incentives and deregulation for builders, along with a basically pointless but extremely popular provision restricting big financial firms from speculating in the real-estate market. It’s a good bill that had wide bipartisan buy-in and the blessing of the White House. Moreover, it only improved as it was moving through the legislative sausage-making process. Republicans wanted to show they were taking steps on affordability. Democrats wanted to show that, despite their relative lack of power in the minority, they were scoring wins to rein in big corporations. Everybody wins!
Until yesterday, that is. That’s when Trump suddenly announced he was derailing the bill his administration had helped build and shepherd through Congress just minutes before the ceremony at which he was to sign it into law. The chairs and podium were already set up in Statuary Hall and lawmakers were already starting to assemble for the victory party when Trump fired up Truth Social: “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. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Don’t say the guy’s lost his flair for the dramatic. The scene was almost Shakespearean: a sudden, shocking betrayal at the very last moment, leaving lawmakers aghast and ashen-faced. Some made hopeful noises that Trump would reconsider once he was reminded how many of his own legislative priorities were in the bill. Others started brainstorming about whether they might be able to carve a piece or two out of the Save America Act that could pass the Senate and, in theory, placate the president.
In fact, if you’d followed the president’s housing statements closely, you might have been a bit less surprised. Although the White House had been heavily involved with creating the ROAD to Housing Act, Trump himself wasn’t so sure he wanted to see housing affordability improve. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes,” Trump said at a cabinet meeting in January. “And they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen.”
The only part of the bill Trump really liked, funnily enough, was its slopulist ban on institutional investors buying single-family homes. Other legislators had seen that provision as the candy coating to make their otherwise boring but useful pro-housing bill easier to pitch. Trump wanted nothing but the candy coating. And ultimately, he didn’t want it so much that he wasn’t willing to sacrifice it on the altar of the Save America Act.
Trump’s sudden reversal is yet another self-inflicted wound, the latest demonstration of his inability to form a useful theory of mind for the electorate: He simply cannot get it through his head that voters really care more about their cost of living than they do about his grasping attempts to avoid losing an election at all costs. And he’s robbing the Republicans—who, unlike him, actually need to win an election this year—of one of their most potent affordability arguments as a result.
For these lawmakers, Trump couldn’t be making it plainer: If you’re not ready to burn down everything in service of what he tells you to do, he’s not interested in working with you on anything, period. It’s the “bomb the bridges and power plants” strategy applied to Congress: If you make people hurt enough, Trump is pretty sure, eventually they’ll do what you want. That theory didn’t work on Iran. How far it will work on Senate Republicans remains to be seen.