The misnamed SAVE America Act feels like it’s DOA on Capitol Hill, but Donald Trump and his biggest goons keep on pretending it’s his administration’s signature legislation. I don’t think that’s because they actually think it will pass, although Trump is such a pudding-brain these days, it’s possible he still thinks he can force it through. So why all the fuss? 

Frankly, I think it’s more about apportioning blame after the midterms. Trump and other MAGA Republicans want to keep pushing the idea that most Americans are not legitimate voters, either because they aren’t white or because they’re too liberal. All that resentment can definitely be channeled into future fundraising and organizing. Unfortunately, as we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, it can also lead to violence, something I have no doubt Trump wants to keep in his back pocket against future contingencies.

Trump hates most actual Americans, and wants us to suffer. I know that’s a broad generalization, but watching the situation at airports, it’s hard to escape that conclusion. Sending ICE in is almost certain to make the already long lines at TSA, caused by the DHS shutdown, even worse. And here’s the thing: It won’t just make things worse for Democratic voters. Trump voters fly, too! 

There’s a similar situation going on with gas prices. Trump and even Vice President JD Vance can’t help but sneer with annoyance every time they’re asked to care about skyrocketing prices at the pump. Trump even tried to spin that as a good thing, claiming that“we make a lot of money” when gas prices go up. Of course, that “we” does not include approximately 99% of Americans, so he’s basically just telling the rest of us we don’t matter. Including his own voters. 

I don’t think this is some attempt at playing 11th-level chess. Nope, I think Trump and the rest of the White House really do hate Americans. They view the majority who don’t support the MAGA agenda as bratty liberals who need to be squashed into silence. But they also hold most Trump voters in contempt, seeing them as easily duped morons. (Which is hard to argue with, honestly!) 

It’s one thing to pander to the littlebrains during the campaign with idiotic lies about pet-eating immigrants and antifa super-soldiers. But once you’re in office, you have to govern, even in the half-assed Trumpian style, and all sorts of annoying real-world problems keep coming up. 

To Trump and his top brass, like Vance, feeling like they owe anything to anybody, especially to the red-hat yokels who got them into office, is insulting. Their resentment at their own voters for actually expecting results is getting worse, and that’s starting to be reflected in policy choices.

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To be fair, there is one group of Americans Trump doesn’t hate: rich people. He still wants to impress them and that urge, more than any strategic (ha!) goal, is shaping the Iran war. If you wonder why Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has become one of the main White House war salesmen on TV, even though his job has nothing to do with foreign policy, that’s why. Bessent’s task is to reassure investors well enough that they don’t bail out of the financial markets, which are almost certainly Trump’s main priority above international stability, everyday people’s finances and human lives. 

That appears to be the driving force behind Trump’s ever-changing threats against Iran. He told Iran it had 48 hours to open the Strait of Hormuz, or he would bomb Iranian power plants. Then it looked like that threat might crash the stock market, so he changed the “deadline” to after the Wall Street bell this coming Friday. He also says he’s in “strong talks” with Iran, which no one with any sense believes is true. Alas, that description evidently doesn’t include our capitalist class, because the markets rebounded. 

You might think Trump would be more worried about alienating his own voters, who are far more the source of his political power than his ultra-wealthy friends. But as I wrote above, he loathes his supporters and can’t run again anyway, so he feels less pressure to pretend that he cares. Second, he and other leading Republicans, I suspect, believe that GOP base voters can be persuaded to blame immigrants or trans athletes or college students for gas prices. After all, those kinds of lies got them full power in D.C., didn’t they? 

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