Trump's only hope is to rig the election

At 5:22 this morning, on International Women’s Day, while women around the world were being honored for their contributions, their courage, and their fight for equality, the President of the United States was demanding that Congress make it harder for them to vote.

He posted this on Truth Social:

The President of the United States is now openly refusing to sign a single bill into law until Congress passes a measure that would strip the ballot from the very people whose rights have always been hardest won. Women. College students and Americans living abroad. Senior citizens. Black and Brown Communities. Low-income folks. Working Americans who can’t take a Tuesday off to stand in line for hours because they no longer have access to a mail-in ballot. The people who have always had to fight to be counted at all.

And he’s not just demanding that Congress pass the SAVE Act. He’s demanding the most punishing version of it. No mail-in voting except for military, illness, disability, or travel. Proof of citizenship to register. Photo ID at the polls. And because cruelty is the throughline, he added a line about transgender children and women’s sports, as if that has anything to do with voting. It’s not about safety. It’s not about fairness. And it is certainly not about election integrity.

Because noncitizen voting is already illegal. It has been for over a century. Study after study, audit after audit, has confirmed that it happens so rarely that it is statistically nonexistent. This is not about protecting elections. It is about rigging them, before a single vote is cast.

Because here is what the SAVE Act actually does. It doesn’t build one big wall between voters and the ballot box. It builds dozens of smaller ones. Each restriction sounds reasonable in isolation. Show an ID. Prove your citizenship. Vote in person. But stacked together, they form a barricade. Not because people aren’t citizens or because they don’t have the right to vote. But because they don’t have a passport, or because they never had or lost their birth certificate along the way. Or because their documents don’t match after a marriage, a divorce, or a name change for other reasons. And this disproportionately affects women more than most people realize. Women, far more than men, are required to prove every legal name they’ve ever had, from birth, through marriage, through divorce, through remarriage, creating a bureaucratic paper trail that’s expensive to maintain and nearly impossible to reconstruct on short notice. If a woman’s current ID doesn’t match the name on her birth certificate, or if a passport has lapsed, or if she can’t afford to request new certified copies of every document in the chain, she can be turned away at the polls. Every additional step removes more people. And the people it removes are not random. They are disproportionately young, elderly, low-income, and people of color. They are disproportionately women.

What they’re doing is what I call the Swiss cheese method. On its own, one hole might not stop you. But when you stack the slices, the holes don’t line up. Even if you manage to squeeze through one barrier, you hit a solid wall behind it. That’s the point. They’re layering obstacle after obstacle, voter ID, proof of citizenship, name-match requirements, in-person-only voting, each one targeting a different vulnerability. So even if we manage to block one piece of the scheme, another one is already in place to catch the next group. It’s not one big wall. It’s a maze of smaller ones. And the goal is to make sure that by the time we get to the ballot box, millions of us are already locked out.

And this isn’t new. It is the oldest trick in the American playbook. After Reconstruction, when Black men finally secured the right to vote, the backlash didn’t come as one sweeping law. It came as layers. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Grandfather clauses. White-only primaries. Residency rules. Each one designed to sound neutral on paper. None of them mentioned race. But together, they gutted the electorate. By 1940, only 3% of eligible Black voters in the South were registered. Not because they were banned outright. But because surviving every layer was impossible. That is the architecture of the SAVE Act. It follows the same blueprint: not to ban voting, but to make it functionally unreachable for millions of people whose ancestors had to fight for generations to secure that right.

And he knows exactly why he’s doing it. The midterms are coming. He sees the numbers. An NBC News poll found that 62% of Americans disapprove of his handling of inflation. His war in Iran is bleeding American lives and political capital. His approval is sinking. And the only thing that could bring him down for good, the one thing his party fears most, is a free and fair election with high turnout. So he’s doing everything in his power to stop that from happening. He’s not just holding the government hostage. He’s holding democracy hostage. And he chose to do it on International Women’s Day, because the cruelty is always the point.

But what’s even more dangerous than the SAVE Act is the fact that he didn’t write it. That post on Truth Social wasn’t the work of a man obsessed with filibuster procedure. Someone told him to post it. Someone wrote the script. Someone is pulling the strings.

And we know exactly who it is. Because today, Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican, went on CNN and said what many of us have been thinking for a long time. He said that Stephen Miller should leave the White House. He called him “out of his depth” and a “big problem” for the administration. He said Miller has an “outsized influence” over Cabinet operations, that he’s “calling the shots,” and that it “gives me pause.” Tillis was talking specifically about Miller’s interference with the Department of Homeland Security and the immigration crackdown that got Kristi Noem fired. But the pattern he described, an unelected advisor with outsized influence calling the shots for an entire administration, does not stop at one agency.

When a Republican senator goes on national television and warns the country that the real power in the White House isn’t just the president, that is not a policy disagreement. That is a warning.

And the fact that Trump stuffed “NO MEN IN WOMEN’S SPORTS” and “NO TRANSGENDER MUTILATION FOR CHILDREN” into a bill that is supposed to be about voting tells you everything you need to know about how this machine works. Trump doesn’t care about transgender people. He doesn’t think about them. This is not something that keeps him up at night or crosses his mind between golf holes. But Stephen Miller does think about them. Miller knows that these words, “mutilation,” “men in women’s sports,” are engineered to trigger a visceral reaction in the base. He knows that if you attach the right outrage to the right bill, people will ignore everything else. They will look past the voter suppression, past the gutting of mail-in ballots, past every barrier being built between them and the ballot box, because they are too busy seething about a phantom threat. That is the formula. Get people angry enough about something that barely exists, and they will vote against their own interests to stop it. Even women. Even the very people whose rights are being taken away by the bill those lines are buried inside.

Transgender people make up a tiny percentage of the population. Most are simply living their lives, working, raising families, trying to exist in peace. But that is what makes them so effective as a weapon in this strategy. They are visible enough to spark fear, but small enough in number that most Americans have never had a conversation with someone who is transgender, never had a chance to unlearn what they were taught to fear. That gap, between perception and reality, is exactly what movements like this exploit. The NCAA president himself testified before Congress that he is aware of fewer than 10 transgender athletes among more than 500,000 college competitors. Fewer than 10 out of half a million. And the number of transgender youth who receive any form of gender-affirming surgery is vanishingly small, less than 0.01% according to multiple national studies. Zero surgeries were performed on children 12 and under. These are not widespread trends. They are isolated cases, inflated into existential threats by people who know exactly what they are doing and who are counting on most Americans never looking up the numbers for themselves.

Regimes like this know exactly how to manipulate the public. They pick enemies, not because they are threats, but because they are easy targets. And in this case, they are unfamiliar to many people, and that alone breeds fear. That is the formula. And Stephen Miller has spent his entire career mastering it.

Trump’s assault on women’s rights and voting rights didn’t let up all day. This evening, he posted again, this time correcting anyone who dared to call it the SAVE Act:

And when I saw that, something in me just sank. Not because it was surprising. But because of the sheer relentlessness of it. The weight of watching this man spend an entire International Women’s Day, from before dawn to after dark, hammering away at the right to vote while the country burns around him. It felt overwhelming. Like the kind of day where you don’t know where to put all of it.

But then I remembered a moment. Walking with my daughters through London in 2019. I was a travel writer then. That was my life, and I loved it. Not just the vacation side of it, not the postcards and the bucket lists, but the deeper part. The people. The stories. The way being in other places opens your mind and softens your defenses. I loved bringing that back and telling those stories in ways that made other people want to see more, understand more, let the world in instead of shutting it out.

And for me to be doing that, to be a woman making a living on my own terms, writing my own stories, traveling with my family, that wouldn’t have come easy in another era. A generation earlier, it might have been out of reach entirely. And I didn’t think much about that at the time. I just lived it. I took it for granted the way you do when progress is just part of life. When it becomes so woven into the everyday that you forget anyone ever had to fight for it.

And as I walked through Parliament Square that day, I saw a statue that brought everything I was feeling into focus. It made me realize just how lucky I was to be living in these times, and it made me reflect on the sacrifices so many women made before me so that I could.

The statue was of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the leader of the constitutional women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. She spent six decades of her life fighting for women’s right to vote. And in the statue, she is holding a banner with five words that I have never forgotten since the moment I first saw them:

“Courage calls to courage everywhere.” Those words were spoken by Fawcett more than a hundred years ago. And they feel more urgent now than they have in a very long time.

I remember standing there with my daughters, reading those words on the banner, and suddenly feeling the full weight of what I had been walking through life carrying without noticing. The freedom to be there. The ability to choose this work, to choose any work. The chance to raise daughters who could grow up believing that the world was theirs, too. All of it had come from somewhere. Women bled for that. They were arrested, ridiculed, beaten, force-fed. They were told to sit down and shut up. And they didn’t. Their names are carved into the base of that statue to remind us what it took to secure even the most basic rights that so many of us now carry without thinking. And it also took nearly a century of that fight just to get one statue of one woman in a square full of men.

I have been thinking about that statue all day. About those five words. About what they meant when Fawcett said them, and what they mean right now, on a day when the President of the United States spent every waking hour trying to make it harder for women to vote. And then, when I sat down tonight to write about it, I looked up the history. And I realized something that made it all come full circle.

The campaign to place that statue in Parliament Square, the first statue of a woman in a square that had held only men for over a century, surrounded by Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela, Lincoln, eleven statues, all of them men, was launched on March 8th, 2016. International Women’s Day. It was started by the activist Caroline Criado Perez, who had gone for a run through the square, looked around, and realized what was missing. She started a petition. It got 74,000 signatures. And two years later, in 2018, the statue was unveiled.

Today is exactly ten years to the day from when that campaign began. Ten years ago, Caroline Criado Perez set out to put a woman in Parliament Square. And today, on International Women’s Day 2026, the President of the United States is holding the government hostage to pass a law that would make it harder for women to vote.

Since that trip, so much has changed. But one thing has not. Women never stop fighting. Not just for ourselves, but for our daughters and our granddaughters and for the women we will never meet who will inherit whatever we leave behind. We are willing to give up everything for that. Not just our safety or our comfort, but the living of our own lives, the quiet moments, the peace we deserved but never got to keep, because something bigger demanded that we show up instead.

Because courage calls to courage everywhere. It always has. And the courage of every woman who came before us is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.

Picture of the day: Today was a gorgeous day in San Diego. A couple of my daughters invited me to go with them to the Birch Aquarium in La Jolla, and while they were off looking at different exhibits, I snuck away to the overlook and took this picture. It was a nice break from the relentless chaos coming out of the Trump administration. And it was an easy way to put my personal economic protest into practice. I'm continuing to prioritize where every dollar goes, and supporting a place like the Birch Aquarium, dedicated to science and education, feels like exactly the right kind of investment.