President Donald Trump has made the SAVE America Act his top legislative priority heading into the November midterms — and a handful of Republicans keep getting in his way.
One of those Republicans just got called out by name from the Oval Office.
And the diagnosis Trump delivered left Senator Lisa Murkowski looking less like a Republican every single day.
Speaking to reporters recently from the Oval Office, Trump unloaded on U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and three other Republican holdouts blocking the SAVE America Act, a commonsense piece of legislation that would require voters to show photo ID and proof of citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections. The bill passed the House earlier this year on a near party-line vote and has been stalled in the Senate ever since.
Trump did not mince words about Murkowski.
“She’s Trump Deranged, what can I tell you?” Trump told reporters, singling out the Alaska senator by name.
But he did not stop there. Trump went on to point out that he has delivered more for Alaska than just about any president in recent memory — and that Murkowski repays it with obstruction.
“Nobody has done more for Alaska than me,” Trump said. “Murkowski’s terrible, terrible to us, terrible to the country.”
Trump also lit into former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has joined Murkowski, U.S. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), and U.S. Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) in voting against the SAVE America Act multiple times. Trump called McConnell “an angry man who is very disloyal to John Thune” — a pointed reference to McConnell’s pattern of undercutting his own party’s current Senate leadership.
“He’s an angry man who is very disloyal to John Thune,” Trump said. “Mitch McConnell’s a bad guy, and I thought he was lousy at his job.”
The four Republican senators — Murkowski, McConnell, Collins, and Tillis — have now voted against the SAVE America Act multiple times, each time siding with every Senate Democrat to kill the bill. The most recent attempt failed 48-50 after the four joined Democrats to block an amendment that would have attached the legislation to a nearly $70 billion package funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol.
Trump’s frustration came through loud and clear.
“Those four or five people that I mentioned, how do you vote against SAVE America? How do you vote against it? How do you vote against voter identification or proof of citizenship?” Trump asked reporters.
And then he answered his own question.
“The only people that would vote against that are people that are going to cheat in an election. The Democrats need it because their policy is so bad. They want open borders and high taxes,” Trump said.
The SAVE America Act is exactly what it sounds like — a measure to make sure only American citizens decide American elections. It requires documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote, photo ID at the polls, and tightens eligibility for mail-in ballots. Trump has called it his top legislative priority and has refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill until the Senate gets the SAVE Act across the finish line. Critics in the media have tried to frame this as a hostage-taking strategy. It is not. It is a President using the leverage available to him to protect the integrity of the vote.
Murkowski’s stated objection is that the bill would burden rural Alaskans who live far from election offices and may not have passports. But Alaska already requires residents to verify their eligibility for the state’s annual Permanent Fund dividend — a process that demands documentation from even the most remote corners of the state. The burden argument only goes so far before it starts sounding like something else entirely.
McConnell’s objections have been even harder to square. He wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the SAVE America Act would give a future president and Congress the ability to carry out a “complete federal takeover of American elections.” That is a remarkable thing for a Republican to write about a bill requiring voters to prove they are American citizens.
Trump has been warning these senators for months. Earlier this year, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference, he told the crowd directly: “She’ll never win another election, I can tell you” — referring to Murkowski, who is not up for reelection until 2028.
But the political math here is genuinely tricky. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, which means they can only afford to lose three votes on most legislation. Four Republicans voting no is one too many. And since McConnell and Tillis are both retiring at the end of this term, the White House has almost no leverage over them. Murkowski has survived primary challenges before and has shown she does not need Trump’s blessing to win in Alaska.
What makes this particularly galling to Trump supporters is the simplicity of what the SAVE America Act actually does. Voter ID is supported by large majorities of Americans across party lines. Requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote is not a radical idea — it is what most functioning democracies do as a matter of course. The 2020 election raised serious and legitimate questions about last-minute rule changes, mail-in ballot expansions, and the flood of private money that poured into election offices in key states. Millions of Americans still have those questions. The SAVE America Act is a direct response to them.
And yet four Republican senators keep killing it.
Trump made clear he sees this not as a policy disagreement but as something closer to sabotage. The Democrats, he said, oppose election integrity because their own policy agenda is so unpopular they cannot win a clean fight. “They want open borders and high taxes,” he told reporters. The implication being that a party confident in its ideas does not need to fight this hard against showing voters who they are.
Whether the SAVE America Act can still be revived before November remains an open question. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) has resisted pressure to fire the Senate parliamentarian or eliminate the filibuster to force the bill through. Trump has publicly called on Thune to do both. Thune has pushed back, acknowledging the political risk of drastic procedural moves that could boomerang when Democrats eventually reclaim the Senate majority.
But Trump’s message to Murkowski and the rest of the holdouts was unmistakable. Opposing a bill that asks voters to prove they are Americans is not a principled stand. In Trump’s view, it is Trump Derangement Syndrome — plain and simple.
Sources: Mediaite; RealClearPolitics; The Hill; Fox News; One America News Network; Alaska’s News Source (KTUU); Alaska Watchman; Mediaite (SAVE Act stalled)