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.
Trump Shoots Another Legislative Hostageby 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. Trump Wants Only One Thing: To Control Our Electionsby William Kristol A couple of days ago, I wrote that “we’re entering a period of maximum authoritarian threat, one that makes Watergate look like child’s play. And we’ll be in that era of threat for the next two and a half years.” Today I just want to add a pretty obvious point: November 3, 2026 is key. It’s likely to be the crucial moment, the potential inflection point, in shaping the course of these next two and a half years. If Democrats win control of both chambers of Congress, or even of one or even both , there’s at least a decent chance of success in checking to some degree Trump’s assault on our civil and political liberties. The good news is that the public is holding firm in its disapproval of Trump and its desire to check him. Democrats are very likely to do well in free and fair elections this fall. But Trump knows that. And he and his henchmen know how damaging a loss in November would be. Just yesterday, we had several reminders of the lengths to which the administration may go to try to prevent such a defeat. The first data point was Trump’s dramatic refusal, described by Andrew above, to sign a bipartisan housing bill in an attempt to pressure Republican senators to advance his federal voter suppression agenda. Trump said he wouldn’t sign the legislation “until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency.” Trump’s willingness to take any hostage available to pressure recalcitrant Republican senators to help subvert the 2026 elections is striking. It seems for now that Republican senators will continue to resist this part of Trump’s authoritarian agenda. But might they bow to this pressure, as they have in so many other areas? And what if they don’t? Trump’s invocation yesterday of a “national emergency” was ominous. He and his apparatchiks have used the language of “emergency” to claim unprecedented executive powers in a variety of areas. If his election subversion legislation can’t pass in the Senate, are we confident Trump won’t try to implement it on his own? I’m not. Another data point: In testimony yesterday before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Trump’s postmaster general, David Steiner, defended a new rule proposed by the administration under which the Postal Service can refuse to deliver ballots in states that don’t turn over their voting lists to the federal executive branch. Courts around the nation have found this federal demand for state lists unjustified by any law or the Constitution. But the Trump administration intends to try to move ahead using its executive authority. The Trump administration is all-in on tilting the playing field so as not to lose this November. Will other players step up to save the day? Will judges allow themselves to see the broader implications of the Trump administration’s acts, abandoning a presumption of regularity by the executive branch and approaching cases with a presumption of suspicion? Will senior officials cashiered from the military speak out about what’s happening at Pete Hegseth’s Defense Department? Will public servants still in government do what they can, peacefully and lawfully, to challenge and impede their political masters’ authoritarian schemes? Will activists continue and even redouble their admirable efforts at mobilizing public resistance around the nation? Above all, will Democrats in Congress fight over the next months in every way and on every front—including fighting every funding increase—to stop the Trump administration from amassing even more power? Trump claims it’s an emergency. But the true emergency is that his authoritarian project is in his full swing. Can the defenders of democracy rise to the occasion? AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick HitsTHE CONSTITUTION SAYS I CAN DO WHAT I WANT: Donald Trump’s first executive order about elections last year included language attempting to require people to prove their citizenship to vote. Lacking the power to change federal election law by fiat, the administration had tried instead to strong-arm states to comply with a host of standards not present in law by threatening to cut off federal money to any that refused. A federal judge temporarily blocked that order last year, and this week she made her decision permanent, ruling that the order would have unconstitutionally usurped congressional powers. “While the Constitution vests the President with ‘executive power’ and commands him to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” Judge Denise Casper wrote, “it does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.” It wasn’t the president’s only legal setback on elections yesterday. The courts have consistently stymied Trump’s efforts to seize various swing states’ voter rolls, and on Wednesday, a three-judge panel gave the president another L on that front, affirming the dismissal of a Justice Department lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson. GENERAL DOWN: Another day, another top general apparently purged by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The Washington Post reports:
Read the whole thing. Mark Hertling, who once held the command Donahue is now leaving, described how valuable an officer Donahue is on “Command Post” yesterday, and has an article on the homepage today about how much it hurts the military and the country when accomplished leaders are forced out. WHEN IN DOUBT, BLAME BIG OIL: Donald Trump took a page out of Joe Biden’s inflation-survival playbook this week, fuming in a Truth Social post late Tuesday night that gasoline prices remained elevated despite the cost of oil falling amid his peace negotiations with Iran. “Customers are being ‘gouged,’” Trump wrote. “I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!” It was a twist on a move more often practiced by Democrats: Be mad at the corporations, not at us. But of course it was also uniquely Trumpian: Biden’s attempts to blame price-gouging corporations for bad economic conditions never included vague and ominous threats of criminal investigation. And they also rarely came on the back of months of presidential cheerleading over how much money the greedy corporations were making: Throughout the Hormuz crisis, Trump routinely argued that the energy shock was good for America, since so much of the rest of the world was forced to import so much American oil. Cheap Shots
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