Proving there is no limit to the suffering he is willing to inflict on Americans if he thinks it will benefit him, Donald Trump is demanding that congressional Republicans shut down the federal government unless both houses mandate that people present proof that they are U.S. citizens in order to register to vote.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) postponed a vote Wednesday on including this restriction in a continuing resolution needed to fund government once the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1. He acknowledged that he needs more time to round up enough Republican votes.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has said that the Senate won’t take the voting measure up. The White House has said President Joe Biden will veto it if it reaches his desk. If both chambers and Biden can’t agree on a continuing resolution by Oct. 1, much of the government will shut down.
Trump knows that, in good times, the party controlling the White House often wins presidential elections. But in bad times, the opposing party often wins. So, Trump is cynically working to make times as bad as possible.
Trump posted Tuesday, on the social media site he owns, that without “absolute assurances on Election Security” Republicans in the House and Senate “SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET.”
He added that “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”
Trump falsely said during his Tuesday debate against Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris that Democrats are trying to get unauthorized immigrants to vote for their candidates. (Note that voting by noncitizens is already illegal.) He again falsely claimed in the debate that he was reelected in 2020, denying that judges issued over 60 rulings rejecting his bogus claims of election fraud.
A government shutdown would be bad news for federal workers and the American people they serve. But Trump would view it as good news because he would undoubtedly blame Biden, Harris and congressional Democrats to get more votes.
Trump doesn’t care that a federal government shutdown could furlough an estimated 850,000 federal employees (based on furloughs during shutdowns in 2013 and 2018) and require hundreds of thousands more essential civilian federal employees and 1.3 million active-duty members of the military to continue serving our country without pay.
Federal law requires that everyone denied pay during a shutdown gets back-pay once the shutdown ends, but that doesn’t help to pay for food, shelter, medical bills and other expenses while they aren’t getting paychecks.
Trump also doesn’t care that a five-week government shutdown when he was president cost the U.S. economy $11 billion. He only cares about himself and his own money.
The proof-of-citizenship requirement that Trump is demanding is unnecessary because the already-illegal voting by noncitizens occurs extraordinarily rarely.
A Brennan Center for Justice study of votes cast in 42 jurisdictions in the 2016 election found that after counting 23.5 million votes, “only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting” were referred for investigation or prosecution.
Democrats oppose the requirement that aspiring voters prove they are U.S. citizens because Republicans would use the provision to make it harder for immigrants who have become naturalized U.S. citizens, people of color, young people and others who lean Democratic to register to vote. But this disenfranchisement is precisely what Trump wants.
The New York Times reported Saturday that the Heritage Foundation, a Trump-supporting think tank, has aided Trump’s effort to spread false accusations about noncitizens voting in U.S. elections by creating “several misleading videos” and posting them on social media.
Similar to his reckless demand that the government shut down unless legislation is enacted to combat nonexistent voting by noncitizens, Trump tried to create another crisis earlier by telling congressional Republicans to kill a tough bipartisan bill that would have strengthened U.S. efforts to reduce the flow of unauthorized immigrants crossing into the U.S. from Mexico.
Harris called Trump out for this during their debate, arguing that he wants problems on the border to persist so he can use this as a campaign issue.
Killing the border bill put Trump in the position of a firefighter who is an undercover arsonist who starts blazes so he can be hailed as a hero for putting them out. Fortunately, Biden took executive action that has sharply reduced unauthorized border crossings to a rate lower than when Trump left the White House.
Trump has made doom and gloom claims about what ails America ever since he accepted the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. He is taking down America and forecasting all manner of disasters if he is not put in the White House to boost his election chances. But the routine is getting stale.
For many years, Trump has repeatedly called America “a seriously failing nation,” said unauthorized immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country” (similar to claims Adolf Hitler made against Jews and his other enemies), called criminal immigrants “animals” and “not human,” and called the U.S. “a lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy communist nightmare,” even though crime rose when Trump was president and fell under the Biden-Harris administration.
In the Tuesday night debate, Trump even argued that if Harris is elected America would “end up in World War III” and made several false and crazy claims, including that unauthorized immigrants are eating dogs and cats that people keep as family pets.
In demeaning and insulting America on an almost daily basis, Trump has become the male counterpart of the old “Saturday Night Live” character Debbie Downer. He is Donald Downer, whining and complaining virtually every day.
While Trump pretends he wants to make America great again, his true goal is to make Trump great again with a second term as president. He wants to be elected to gratify his enormous ego, weaponize government against his critics, make as much money as possible and stay out of prison by dismissing federal criminal charges he faces.
While Trump isn’t concerned with how much pain he inflicts on Americans, the rest of us should be concerned with the damage he would do to our democracy, freedoms and national security if he becomes president when we cast our ballots.
I know we have problems today, but our country will have a lot more if Trump is back in the Oval Office.
Donna Brazile is a political strategist, a contributor to ABC News and former chair of the Democratic National Committee. She is the author of “Hacks: Inside the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House.”