Now, back to Trump’s Washington…

It’s hard to recall a moment when Senate Republicans were more at odds with Donald Trump, whose all-consuming obsession with the SAVE America Act—his strict voter ID and proof-of-citizenship bill—has paralyzed Congress and pitted G.O.P. lawmakers against one another just months before the midterms. Senate Majority leader John Thune has told the president on numerous occasions that he doesn’t have the votes for the bill, nor the votes to eliminate the filibuster. And yet Trump wants what he wants: In the last few weeks, he’s canceled the signing of a bipartisan bill to lower housing costs; refused to sign a reauthorization of FISA Section 702, the critical international surveillance tool; sidelined Jay Clayton, his own nominee to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence; and vowed to withhold his endorsement from any lawmaker who doesn’t back the SAVE Act.

The stalemate shows no sign of abating. On Wednesday, Trump spent an hour on Capitol Hill, collectively admonishing Senate Republicans, also to no avail. One senior Senate aide told me that Trump’s performance did little to change minds, adding that it likely did more harm than good. Also last week, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna shut down the House floor, blocking any legislation from advancing until the Senate does the president’s bidding.

The White House is strategizing other ways to force the Senate’s hand, according to a person familiar with the discussions. But they realize they have few options. Thune, whose relationship with the president has rarely been worse, doesn’t appear to be budging. Both the House and the Senate left town early this past week with little to do amid the president’s blockade.

Has a president ever so blatantly worked to undermine his own party, and so close to an election? Speaker Mike Johnson spent nearly three hours in the Oval Office on Thursday, trying to convince Trump that he should sign and take credit for the housing legislation, which would give vulnerable Republicans something to trumpet on the campaign trail. After the meeting, Trump allowed the bill to be transmitted to the White House, though he still hasn’t agreed to sign it. (It will become law after 10 legislative days, unless the president issues a veto beforehand.) And Johnson’s fingers are crossed that Trump convinces Luna to lift her blockade and legislators can once again legislate—even if this Congress hasn’t been doing much of that under the best of circumstances.

But the damage will be lasting, regardless. Republicans worry that Trump’s infatuation with so-called election integrity—he continues to insist, contrary to all evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen from him—will not only derail their legislative agenda but ensure that these will be their final months in power. The longer Republicans bicker among themselves and with the president, the worse their odds of retaining their majority. “It’s been a long session,” one senior Senate G.O.P. aide told me.

The seeds of the present standoff were planted two weeks before Trump even returned to office, when Rep. Chip Roy first introduced the SAVE Act—responding to the desire of the MAGA base to address alleged voter fraud. Of course, the incidence of actual voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. (The conservative Heritage Foundation, which investigated the issue, found a few dozen cases of in-person fraud or noncitizens attempting to vote, out of billions of legitimate votes over five decades.) House Republicans made the bill a priority and passed it in the first 100 days of the new Congress.

But it wasn’t until Trump was briefed on the bill, nearly a year later, that the legislation morphed into a rallying cry and a litmus test for Republicans. In February, Senator Mike Lee, who sponsored the Senate version of the bill, along with Ron Johnson and Rick Scott, got some face time with Trump in the Oval Office. By that point, the bill had been expanded to include voter ID requirements. The three conservatives pitched the president on both the legislation and the changes to the filibuster that would be necessary to pass it.

Trump was sold, of course, and began to fixate on the issue—even as his team was advising him to pivot to the midterms. At a later meeting at his golf club in Miami, he directed that the name be changed to the SAVE America Act. He started to post regularly on Truth Social about it, pressuring the Senate to get it done—and to nuke the pesky filibuster in the process.

Thune’s resistance to changing Senate rules, which he believes would both diminish the institution and vastly empower Democrats if they retake the upper chamber, has been a central storyline in his falling-out with the president. Conservative activists are mystified about why Thune hasn’t been more aggressive in using every lever at his disposal. “The base actually has reasonable expectations in the sense that they understand if you try and fail,” one conservative strategist told me. “But the fact that you don’t try infuriates them more than anything else.” (The South Dakota Republican Party tried but failed to censure Thune at its party convention on Friday.)

But the frustrations run both ways. Many Senate Republicans are particularly tired of Sen. Lee, who has turned the SAVE Act into something like a religious crusade. Indeed, I’ve heard from multiple G.O.P. senators and their aides that they no longer recognize the wonky Mormon lawmaker who once worked the 2016 Republican convention to oppose Trump and who championed civil liberties and criminal justice reform. Some of his colleagues have noted, with some bitterness, that Lee has raised nearly $2 million this cycle—much of it from small-dollar donors, thanks to the voter ID issue. But what most infuriates them is that they believe he is setting false expectations for the base, which could depress Republican turnout in November.

Further complicating matters, Trump keeps demanding that new things be added to the bill, including prohibitions on mail-in balloting and even a transgender sports ban. Republicans are starting to question whether he actually wants to win in November or is instead laying the groundwork to cast blame for the likely loss. “He’s setting the Senate up for the fall,” one Senate Republican strategist told me. “If we lose the House, it becomes the Senate’s fault because they didn’t pass the SAVE Act.” When I mentioned that sentiment to Marc Short, a former top aide to V.P. Mike Pence, he was in complete agreement: “100 percent,” he told me.

More generously, perhaps, Trump simply has different priorities than the Republican lawmakers who are on the ballot this fall. “Nobody cares about the housing bill at my rallies,” Trump told senators during his trip to the Hill on Wednesday, according to a person familiar with his comments. “But when I mentioned the SAVE America Act, I can’t get them to sit down.”

The president has consistently shown that his theory of politics is to appeal singularly to his base, which works when he’s on the ballot. Republicans haven’t quite figured out how to win when he’s not. The SAVE Act, some who side with the president think, is their silver bullet—even if it would disenfranchise millions of voters who can’t find their birth certificate or never bothered to get a passport.

But the polling is undeniable: The majority of voters say high gas prices, persistent inflation, and unaffordable housing are their top concerns going into the midterms. And Republican senators believe those issues are key to appealing to a general electorate, especially in purple states they must win. The president’s aides have been trying for six months to get him to pivot to affordability issues. But he continues to tell reporters that affordability is a “hoax.” (Indeed, Trump has said on more than one occasion that he wants to drive housing prices up, so as not to threaten the net worth of existing homeowners.) And many Republicans believe that focusing on the SAVE Act is divisive and will hurt their electoral chances. “Promising the moon and stars and yet destining Republicans for failure is a very effective way to demoralize our base and elect more Democrats in the midterms,” Sen. John Cornyn wrote on X this weekend.

If Republicans lose in November, one thing is certain: Trump will blame voter fraud that would not have happened, he will claim, if the SAVE Act were law.

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