Trump should force Congress to pass the SAVE America Act — now

I have been adamant throughout our months of Iran coverage that President Trump needs to turn his attention back home and start using his domestic political leverage to address our problems here.

So watching him threaten not to sign the housing bill Congress just passed unless lawmakers also pass the SAVE America Act is music to my ears.

We live in an era of survival. The enemy is an unrelenting demonic construct, and my conscience tells me without ambiguity that it must be defeated before we are.

Demanding election integrity is exactly the sort of fight Trump should pick. The housing bill is already divisive within the MAGA base, so the president risks little political capital by holding it up. If anything, he is postponing an internal coalition fight he will eventually need to have while using his leverage to improve his overall bargaining position.

This maneuver should not be necessary. Trump’s own party controls Congress for the time being. But we have to live in the world as it is. And in the world as it is, John Thune (R-S.D.) still sucks.

If Trump vetoes a housing bill that does not include the SAVE Act, I would wager the odds are roughly 50-50 that Congress overrides him. In a strange way, that might not be the worst outcome. An override could provoke Trump to get Hulk-mad on the domestic front, which is exactly where we need his attention from now through the midterms and beyond.

I do not see a real loss here for the president unless he caves.

He cannot pick this fight now and fail to follow through. This is a game of chicken. As “The Hunt for Red October” taught us, the hard part about playing chicken is knowing when to flinch.

It is also almost America’s 250th birthday. Asking Congress to protect one of the people’s birthrights — free and fair elections — seems modest enough. It is one of the main reasons we are celebrating at all.

Good thing, then, that “The Art of the Deal” has always been Trump’s favorite hill to die on. He is a subject-matter expert in leverage-based negotiation. This is his game.

Get busy living or get busy dying.

The meter is running not only on Trump’s presidency but on the fate of the entire nation. New York, for example, continues to be handed over to Islamic socialists.

Three Democratic congressional district primaries just went exactly the way socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) wanted them to go as he turns the Big Apple into his own private Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, too many of the Republicans we regularly vote for have no interest in reading the signs of the times, assuming they are capable of reading them at all.

That is why voters turned to Trump in the first place. It is also why he is almost all they have to rely on right now.

What kind of political party needs to be leveraged into passing legislation that would make it easier for that party to win elections — and that an overwhelming majority of the people want passed?

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How politically brain-dead does that sound when you say it out loud?

But that is the GOP for you.

Decades of such institutional stupidity have made our politics more existentially binary than ever. We are out of options other than making the best use of what we have. It is Team GOP or bust.

I desperately dislike being in that position. In fact, I have spent much of my career trying to avoid such a fate. But again, we have to live in the world as it is.

You may have deep theological or philosophical disagreements with members of your government that, in another era, would not be reconcilable. But that is not the era we inhabit.

We live in an era of survival. The enemy is an unrelenting demonic construct, and my conscience tells me without ambiguity that it must be defeated before we are.

Two worldviews enter. One must leave. That is the only playbook before the GOP, whether the party understands it or not. Our team is on the field.

One way or another, I plan to win.