Trump Is Genuinely Incapable of Accepting a Win That Falls in His Lap

Does Donald Trump have what are genuinely the worst electoral instincts of any man who has ever actually been elected to two terms as the President of the United States? We’re talking about the guy, after all, who once said that he could shoot someone dead in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York and not lose any voters. Even when he has the opportunity to easily do something that is demonstrably popular, not only with his base but with the entire American electorate, he finds a way to avoid doing it, even when there’s no negative cost to himself. Look no further than the bipartisan housing bill recently passed through both chambers of Congress–regardless of the actual effectiveness of said bill, it quite clearly enjoys extremely broad, bipartisan public support from voters. Any other President? They would sign it and immediately start taking credit for a popular piece of legislation. Donald Trump? He’s so tied up in a toddler-like tantrum about Republican senators not obeying his every command that he’s refusing to sign the housing bill out of pure, pointless petulance. He might as well be rifling through drawers in search of a gun he can use to shoot himself in the foot.

This is a man who is severely allergic to doing anything popular, to an extent that is fascinating to behold. The housing bill–full name, 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act–is just an easy win that fell into his lap, courtesy of some extremely rare bipartisan cooperation on an issue (housing availability and affordability) that voters from both parties deeply care about. Leaving aside whether there are actual problems with the legislation, or whether it would actually manage to bring down the cost of new homebuilding, etc., the pure optics of choosing to spite such a bill is the kind of thing any other President would go far out of their way to avoid. So naturally, this was Trump’s (rambling, incoherent) response to the deadline arriving today to sign it:

Ah yes, the old “outlaw mail-in voting for everyone–despite the fact that I myself always vote by mail–or else I’ll tank the effort to bring down home construction costs” ploy. A classic! Trump, of course, has not always been against the housing bill–far from it. He explicitly called on Congress to pass the legislation during his 2026 State of the Union address, called the bill “comprehensive and consequential,” and said his administration “strongly supports” its passage. Congressional Republicans bent over backward to get the bill across the finish line explicitly because it was supposedly part of Trump’s agenda, only for him to flip-flop and betray them at the last minute yet again, canceling the scheduled ceremony where he would have signed the bill only hours before it was set to happen. He then indulged in his penchant for extreme hypocrisy by calling the bill a “yawn” of “minor importance,” as justification for why he would hold the legislation hostage in an effort to get Senate Republicans to bend the knee on his deeply unpopular voter disenfranchisement bill, the “SAVE America Act.”

Q: What are your plans for the housing bill?

TRUMP: I don’t know. I think it’s so unimportant when compared to the SAVE America Act. It’s very bipartisan. That means the Democrats like it.

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 3:38 PM · Jun 29, 2026

Said voting act, which Senate Republicans have resisted thanks to not wanting to face down voters or nuke the filibuster in order to pass it, would strip millions of Americans of the immediate right to vote, along with imposing severe restrictions on voting by mail, a system that is used by millions upon millions of Trump’s own Republican supporters in all 50 states. The President, in his desperation to stave off impending electoral defeat in the 2026 midterms, has repeatedly demonstrated that he doesn’t care how many of his own voters he disenfranchises, as long as he can steal the ability to vote of the right people at the same time.

Meanwhile, he now finds himself as the public face of resistance to the housing bill, despite the fact that he should be signing it as an easy political win. According to polling recently conducted by the American Property Owners Alliance, 89% of registered voters said they support the bill, which includes 87% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats. Is there even a single other bill that could cross his desk that would have such wide appeal? Now he’s even robbed congressional Republicans of being able to celebrate/take credit for its passage, because their god king has now anointed himself as the bill’s enemy. They went through all that effort for nothing.

Even if Trump does indeed refuse to sign the housing bill, it will automatically become law at the end of Friday as long as he does not outright veto it–a move that would seem unlikely, given that it would involve him taking in even more direct blame for thwarting the popular bill’s passage. His tantrum is purely performative at this point, an extinction burst from a baby President who senses he’s losing yet another one of the levers he wanted to use in order to jam the SAVE America Act through the Senate. He’s seemingly totally blind, meanwhile, to the negative optics of not supporting a bill entirely sold on addressing affordability issues, given that Trump has previously referred to the very word “affordability” as “a fake word” and “a con job.”

It’s not like we should expect something different of a man who is so deficient in electoral instincts that he’ll say something like “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation,” but each time he says something like that–something that would end any previous presidency on the spot–you do sort of have to take a step back and marvel at how low the bar is currently set. Even when he’s presented with a gift-wrapped opportunity to do the smallest thing that is popular, he still finds a way to screw it up.

Anyway, if he doesn’t want to talk about housing, what does he want to talk about today instead? Let’s see … oh. Oh god.