The Dictatorship
Trump’s refusal to sign the bipartisan housing bill hurts his own party for no reason
Two weeks ago, the Republican-led House easily passed a landmark housing bill on a 358-32 votefollowing a similarly lopsided 85-5 vote in the GOP-led Senate. The stage was literally set for the most important bill signing ceremony of the year, right up until Donald Trump threw a tantrumscrapped the plans and prioritized a voter suppression proposal that lacks the support to pass.
Shortly after the surprising developments, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters that he had spoken directly with the president and was confident that he would eventually sign the bill into law. “The president, when we go through the details of the bill, he’s going to understand that it’s a good product,” the Louisiana Republican said.
As is often the case, Trump made Johnson look foolish soon after. On Friday morning, the president published a 229-word screed to his social media platform that read, in part:
I will not sign the Housing Bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House, in PROTEST over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of passing THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.
In the sentences that follow, Trump had nothing to say about the housing bill that is pending on his desk and instead made a series of hysterical claims about his anti-voting proposal.
It’s important to emphasize that he didn’t say he’d veto the housing bill, declaring only that he wouldn’t sign it. As a result, the legislation is set to automatically become law on Friday night at midnight, unless Trump changes direction again.
For proponents of the underlying policy, that’s good news. Indeed, the legislative package, formally named the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, passed both chambers easily because it’s a genuinely good proposal. As Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, one of the principal co-authors of the bill, explained via social media“I don’t say this often these days, but Congress actually passed something good. My bipartisan housing bill to build more housing, lower costs, and stop private equity’s housing grab is becoming law.”
But as a political matter, Trump has screwed over his own allies for no reason.
The bipartisan housing bill was poised to be the only meaningful legislative breakthrough of the year. GOP leaders were counting on this to show, shortly before the midterm elections, that a Republican-led Congress is capable of passing a good bill that addresses a serious issue that much of the country cares about.
But instead of allowing his own party to celebrate an election-season victory, Trump scrapped a previously choreographed signing ceremony — which was poised to create visuals that could be used in GOP campaign ads — before downplaying the legislation itself as effectively meaningless.
“It’s a yawn,” Trump said last weekadding that the housing bill is “so unimportant” when compared with the anti-voting measure he can’t get through Congress.
A week later, the president announced that he won’t sign it, either.
It’s as if Trump spent two weeks thinking about how best to hurt his own allies’ strategy for an election-season victory, and then followed that counterproductive plan to the letter.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”