Suffering in the Service of Trump

The former president is fine with shutting down the government or delaying interest rate cuts so long as it helps his political chances.

One of the bigger gut checks for Kamala Harris since she took over the Democratic ticket came yesterday afternoon, when she failed to secure the endorsement of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, one of the country’s largest labor unions. The last time the Teamsters didn’t endorse the Democratic presidential candidate: 1996.

In announcing they would remain neutral in the election, the Teamsters released internal member polling to explain why. In straw polls of members conducted prior to Joe Biden’s withdrawal, the president edged Donald Trump 44 percent to 36 percent. A phone poll conducted last week found Teamsters supporting Trump over Harris 58 percent to 31 percent.

Many of the summer fears of the Joe-can’t-go crowd have proven unfounded. But the fear that Democrats would miss Biden’s strength in neutralizing Trump’s pull on culturally conservative union members seems to have been on the money. Harris’s polling position remains lightyears better than Biden’s and she has secured a number of other major labor endorsements. That includes a number of local Teamsters unions, who bucked the national arm and chose to offer their support. Still, some cause for concern here. Happy Thursday.

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Donald Trump talks to reporters while visiting the polling site at Londonderry High School on January 23, 2024 in Londonderry, New Hampshire. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

Blowing Up the Store

—Andrew Egger

It might seem insane for a presidential candidate to actively invite a government shutdown just weeks before asking voters to entrust him to run the government. But, well, here he goes:

The SAVE Act, if you’re unfamiliar, has been perhaps the ur-messaging bill for House Republicans this year. It would create a new federal requirement for states to obtain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before registering a person to vote—a necessity, Trump and his allies insist, to prevent a wave of illegal migrant voting across the nation this November.

It may not shock you to hear this is pure hokum. While processes vary by state, America’s electoral systems already contain verification steps to ensure non-voters can’t simply stroll in and vote, and to catch them should they try.

And a vanishingly small number of illegal immigrants ever try, for a pretty obvious reason: As crimes go, trying to pass yourself off as a legal voter pairs enormous risk—as in, you’re probably getting deported—with tiny, tiny reward.

“This is a crime where not only are the consequences really high and the payoff really low—you’re not getting millions of dollars, it’s not robbing a bank, you get to cast one ballot,” Sean Morales-Doyle, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice, told NBC News earlier this year. “But what also makes this somewhat unique is that committing this crime actually entails the creation of a government record of your crime.”

If the SAVE Act were just a solution for an immigrant-voting problem that doesn’t exist, Democrats might not care enough to oppose it. The bigger issue is that adding a proof-of-citizenship requirement threatens to disenfranchise plenty of eligible voters that the government already knows perfectly well are citizens, just by raising the burden of documentation to participate. (As a former disorganized 22-year-old who took six months to put together the necessary documentation to get my D.C. driver's license when I moved to the area back in 2017, this is a struggle I intimately understand.)

People of goodwill can quibble over the correct policy balance between keeping voting relatively painless and keeping elections safe from would-be bad actors. But this bill isn’t that: It’s a poison pill meant to smear Democrats as supporters of illegal voting. And—I feel like we haven’t stressed this enough—Donald Trump wants to shut down the government over it.

The shutdown tantrum isn’t a new move for Trump, who provoked America’s longest-ever shutdown during his presidency out of pique that Congress wouldn’t fund his border wall. And it underscores once again how content Trump is with inflicting pain on ordinary people if he believes it will advance his political interests.

As the New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch points out, that’s basically become Trump’s signature out-of-power move: publicly hoping for Russia not to release U.S. hostages until after the election, lobbying for Republicans to kill a border-security bill out of a belief the migration crisis could help him electorally, spiking funding deals left and right, and (just yesterday) whining about pre-election interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

But the real malice here is in the propaganda Trump plainly intends to spread once the SAVE Act doesn’t pass. It’s right there in his tweet: “Democrats are registering Illegal Voters by the TENS OF THOUSANDS, as we speak—They will be voting in the 2024 Presidential Election, and they shouldn’t be allowed to.”

Trump may not lose in November. But if he does, it’s one of politics’ rare sure bets he’ll try to find a way to steal his way to victory anyway. And you can also bet the milk money that Congress’s unwillingness to pass the SAVE Act will feature heavily in the lies he tells to try to make that happen.

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A quick programming note: The Bulwark is hitting the Atlantic Festival today!

Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and Bill Kristol will join Atlantic contributor Evan Smith to explore the future of American conservatism on stage at The Atlantic Festival in Washington, D.C. on Thursday, September 19 at 3:00pm ET. 

The Atlantic Festival is a two day event of back to back interviews, book talks, premiere screenings, and panel discussions where elected officials, best-selling authors, notable actors, climate scientists, health-care professionals, tech giants, and CEOs tackle today’s big questions and meet the moment head-on.

A limited number of in-person passes remain and you can livestream this and other mainstage sessions from anywhere, with a free Virtual Pass. 

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Discontent Creators

—Joe Perticone

The SAVE Act isn’t the only kayfabe-season exercise that Congress is engaged in.

In the limited time remaining before the election and with government funding set to expire on September 30, senators seem focused solely at bolstering their political advertising messages with these types of votes.

For Democrats in the majority, that means re-doing votes on previously failed items that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his whip team know would fail again: the Right to IVF Act, for instance, went down a second time to Republican opposition Tuesday.

Votes like these serve one purpose: Senate Democrats are able to telegraph to the public that they are for stronger IVF protections and to catch (nearly) every Republican voting against them.

On the Republican side, the show-vote action is mostly in the House, where much more time and energy is spent on this sort of posturing than on actual legislating. But Senate Republicans are also trying to get in on the action by making unanimous consent requests to pass their pet projects (building a border wall, crackdowns on crime committed by migrants, and so on).

The pains of being in the minority mean that when these requests are made, they don’t receive an up or down vote—just an “I object” from whomever happens to be the presiding Democrat in the chamber. A unanimous consent objection from Patty Murray doesn’t inflict the same sort of pain as forcing, say, Ted Cruz to cast an actual vote against IVF protections—dinging him on one of his most vulnerable issues in Texas.

Of course, members of each party could try to carve a bipartisan path on these critical issues, but let’s not kid ourselves. That’s not the world we live in right now.

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Quick Hits

AND THE NON-EXISTENT CROWD GOES WILD: Donald Trump went on Gutfeld! last night, where he talked about, among other things, his debate performance. “They didn’t correct her once and they corrected me, everything I said practically,” he exclaimed. “And the audience was absolutely, they went crazy.”

Reminder: There was no audience.

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ADULTS IN THE ROOM?: The spending-package-plus-SAVE-Act plan pushed by Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson failed in the House last night in a 202-220 vote. So far, Johnson continues to insist that there “is no plan B.”

“We’re on the field in the middle of the game,” he said yesterday morning. “Quarterback is calling the play. We’re going to run the play.” Clear eyes, full hearts, definitely can lose.

The likeliest outcome here—as, again, has routinely been the case this Congress—is a coalition of Democrats and pragmatic Republicans striking a deal to stave off shutdown; or Johnson just folding and passing whatever the Senate moves. Whether and when the Speaker will play ball—and whether he’ll manage to remain in Trump’s good graces if whatever passes doesn’t include the SAVE Act—remains to be seen.

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DOWN TO THE WIRE: We still don’t know how much of a post-debate bump Kamala Harris can expect after her strong performance last week—though an absolute avalanche of polls this morning shows small leads in the main battleground states (in Pennsylvania, she is either up four, up one, up three, or tied). All told, Harris has had some spots of decent to very good news over the last couple days, including a surprisingly strong showing from a Des Moines Register poll that put Harris just a few points down of Trump in ruby-red Iowa. (Obviously, Harris isn’t counting on any paths to the White House that run through the Hawkeye State. But the DSM poll has a sterling reputation in poll-watcher circles due to pollster Ann Selzer’s seemingly preternatural ability to accurately forecast race after race after race there.)

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