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Trump Threatens Not to Sign New Legislation until Senate Passes SAVE America Act

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As foreign conflict rages on and Congress is locked in a feud over Homeland Security funding, President Donald Trump is hammering Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act. In a Truth Social post on Sunday, the president thanked elections activist Scott Pressler for explaining in a Fox News interview the importance of passing the legislation and how it can be done without dismantling the filibuster. Passing the SAVE America Act “must be done immediately. It supersedes everything else. MUST GO TO THE FRONT OF THE LINE,” the president said. He vowed not to sign further bills until the SAVE America Act is on his desk.

The president also urged senators not to accept a “watered down” version of the bill, but to ensure that key provisions are included: mandatory photo ID to vote and proof of citizenship to register to vote, eliminating mail-in ballots except in a few circumstances, and amendments barring biological males from competing in girls’ sports and halting gender transition procedures from being carried out on children. The bill was approved by the House of Representatives early last month.

In the Fox News interview Trump referenced, Pressler touted poll results showing that over 80% of American voters support the election integrity provisions of the SAVE America Act, such as photo ID and proof of citizenship. “When in American history have 84% of Americans ever come together on an issue before?” Pressler asked. He noted that 76% of black voters, 82% of Hispanic voters, 85% of white voters, 95% of Republican voters, and 76% of Democrat voters support the SAVE America Act’s election integrity provisions. “I ask for Senate leadership, I ask for members of Congress — if you want to do right by the American people that duly elected you into the seats that you are in right now, when we gave Republicans the opportunity to lead and be the adults in the room, pass the SAVE America Act into law,” he urged. Pressler also anticipated that passing the bill will likely produce “a surge of voters com[ing] out in the midterm elections.”

“The Republicans MUST DO, with PASSION, and at the expense of everything else, THE SAVE AMERICA ACT — And not the watered down version. This is a Country Defining fight for the Soul of our Nation!” the president said in a Truth Social post last week. He also called on the Senate to “focus on, exclusively if necessary, THE SAVE AMERICA ACT!!! It’s what everyone wants!!!” With midterm elections looming, the president has also warned senators that the SAVE America Act is “all people care about!!!”

As noted, the SAVE America Act was passed by the House on February 11, but has been stalled in the Senate for nearly four weeks. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-N.D.) has agreed to bring the legislation to the floor for consideration but has yet to schedule a vote. At issue is the filibuster; Senate Democrats have signaled their intention to block the legislation via the filibuster. In recent decades, the “silent filibuster” has become the norm, wherein a senator or party indicates an intention to filibuster, without actually having to filibuster, and the contended bill is simply not brought before the Senate. While Trump and others have suggested eliminating the filibuster entirely in order to push through GOP legislation, others have suggested reverting to the traditional “talking filibuster,” which they admit may be time-consuming but would likely allow Republicans to pass crucial legislation without annihilating Senate traditions and legislative safeguards.

Under traditional Senate rules, the filibuster can be used to delay or prevent the passage of legislation, relying on the Senate’s allowance for unlimited debate. In order to end debate, 60 senators are required to invoke cloture. While the GOP has a majority of 53 in the Senate at present, not all Republican senators have agreed to support the legislation’s passage. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is the clearest example, but others have expressed reluctance to enforce the talking filibuster in order to pass the legislation, claiming that the procedure is too time-consuming.

“The talking filibuster issue is one on which there is not, certainly, a unified Republican conference, and there would have to be,” Thune said after a Senate GOP meeting late last month. “If you go down that path, you’re talking about the need to table what are going to be numerous amendments and an ability to keep 50 Republicans unified, pretty much on every single vote. And there’s just not, there isn’t support for doing that at this point.”

AUTHOR

S.A. McCarthy

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.

EDITORS NOTE: This Washinton Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2026 Family Research Council.

The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

Joy to the World

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One of the greatest Christmas carols involves the contributions of three men, with the first two working independently of each other. The first was the great 17th-century British hymn writer, Isaac Watts. The second was the great 18th-century German-British composer, Handel. The third was an American musician who later married a poem by Watts with music by Handel and gave us one of our most beloved Christmas Carols, “Joy to the World.”

Many years ago, I went to England to videotape some things for Christian television. In London, because of the town’s history, they have blue circles (about a foot in diameter) in front of various buildings to commemorate famous residents.

Well, there were two buildings in one neighborhood, side by side. And they had two separate blue circle plaques. And one of them said that composer George Frideric Handel lived here (I had to look it up: from 1723-1759). And I became very excited. “Wow. This is so great.”

Well, my camera crew said, “Look! In this building, Guitarist Jimi Hendrix lived here” (I looked it up also: this was his last official residence. He died in 1970). And I was like, “Who cares? We’re talking about Handel here.” And they said, “Who cares? We’re talking about Jimi Hendrix here.”

Well, different strokes for different folks. Tastes differ. But we all know I was right. (Smile.) Handel not only wrote the music for Messiah and other great classic works, long after his death, one of his pieces of music was used for the great Christmas carol “Joy to the World.”

Years ago, I had a good Sunday school teacher, Dr. Greg Forster. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale. His doctoral thesis was on John Locke, a political writer who was very influential to the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. Greg became a Christian while doing his Yale thesis on Locke’s book, The Reasonableness of Christianity because of Locke’s pro-faith arguments.

Long after Forster left South Florida, he wrote an article called “Joy FOR the World: Five Lessons about this famous Christmas Carol, Joy TO the World.”

Dr. Greg Forster writes: “Did you know that ‘Joy to the World’ was not written as a Christmas carol? In its original form, it had nothing to do with Christmas. It wasn’t even written to be a song.”

The psalm that became the basis for “Joy to the World” is Psalm 98, which contains nine verses—focusing on praising God, including praise due Him from nature itself. The Psalm in the King James commands: “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise….With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful noise before the Lord, the King.”

Charles Spurgeon, the great 19th-century preacher from England, said this is a coronation psalm and applies to Christ the King.

Spurgeon added that we see here, “Nature at worship. The congregation is vast—sea, earth, rivers, hills.” We have here “the song of the sea, and the hallelujah of the hills.” (“And heaven and nature sing…”)

Prior to Isaac Watts, the Protestant churches usually just sang the words from the Psalms. Watts used the psalms as springboards for further praise to God.

In his book, O Come, Let Us Adore Him, author Robert Morgan says that Isaac Watts virtually “invented” the English hymns. “He did not neglect the Psalms. In 1719, he published a unique hymnal—one in which he had translated, interpreted, and paraphrased the Old Testament Psalms through the eyes of New Testament faith. He called it simply The Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament.”

Isaac Watts’ poem in this book, based on Psalm 98, provided the words for “Joy to the World.” Morgan adds, “Watts interpreted this psalm as a celebration of Jesus’s role as King of both his church and the whole world. More than a century later, the second half of this poem was slightly adapted and set to music to give us what has become one of the most famous of all Christmas carols. ‘Joy to the World.’”

In the early 1800s, a Boston musician named Lowell Mason adapted the tune “Antioch” by Handel to the words, again, of the second part of Watts’ poem based on Psalm 98. And thus, the beloved Christmas Carol, “Joy to the World” was born.

One writer noted, “The lyrics, focusing on Christ’s reign and salvation, became popular at Christmas, though they speak more of His Second Coming than His Nativity.”

Giving thanks to God helps lead to joy. Despite the circumstances. G.K. Chesterton once observed: “When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

Christmas is a time of joy—and this beloved hymn captures that joy well. Merry Christmas!

©2025 All rights reserved.

Trump 2028 Merchandise Appears in His Online Store, and the Left Goes Mad

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Trump 2028 merchandise, including t-shirts, hats, and can coolers, are now available for sale in Trump’s official online store. The t-shirt says “TRUMP 2028 (Rewrite the Rules),” and the ad copy adds cheerfully: “The future looks bright! Rewrite the rules with the new Trump 2028 t-shirt.” As you may expect, heads are already exploding on the left.

A leftist who has over 41,000 followers on X and exhorts them to “Resist” summed up a common leftist response to Trump’s floating the idea of a third term by writing, “The ‘Trump 2028’ push is a calculated campaign to normalize authoritarianism in America. With 270 million followers, Musk is the most powerful political amplifier alive – and he’s using that reach to casually mainstream the idea of a dictatorship.” On ABC30 Action News’ post about the store offerings, one woman commented, “Hell no, please impeach this man already!” Ah, yes, the Democrats’ perennial fallback strategy.

The establishment media, meanwhile, hastened to remind the world that the 22nd Amendment says that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” The Guardian warns that “any serious effort to amend the founding document would send the United States into uncharted territory.” Yeah, who ever heard of the Constitution being amended? Uncharted territory, indeed.

And in late March, when Trump suggested that he was interested in a third term and that the 22nd Amendment wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle (although in all the excitement, it has been completely forgotten that he also said, “I’m not looking at that” and “I don’t even want to talk about a third term now”), New York Magazine stopped hyperventilating long enough to publish an article entitled: “If Trump Gets a 3rd Term, Democracy Will Have Already Ended.” Yeah, yeah, just like we have all died from COVID two or three times over by now.

Amid all the hysteria over Trump’s third term talk, one salient detail seems to have been widely forgotten: He would have to win the 2028 election to remain in the Oval Office after Jan. 20, 2029. The Trump 2028 merch in the Trump online store takes that for granted; otherwise, there would be no need to mention the next presidential election year. No one is talking about canceling elections and ruling as a dictator except leftists who are claiming that Trump wants to do that.

Also, the idea of a president serving a third term didn’t become a symptom of authoritarian dictatorship until Trump started talking about it. Barack Obama said in 2015, “I am in my second term. It has been an extraordinary privilege for me to serve as President of the United States. I cannot imagine a greater honor or a more interesting job. I love my work. But under our Constitution, I cannot run again. I can’t run again. I actually think I’m a pretty good President — I think if I ran, I could win. But I can’t.”

Obama also famously said in late 2020, “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Hmm, could it be that exactly that plan was implemented from 2021 to 2025?

Whether it was or not, nobody was running around spreading the-sky-is-falling hysteria about Obama’s third term talk. And back when Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke a 150-year-old precedent and was elected not only to a third, but also to a fourth term, it was Republicans who pushed through the 22nd Amendment in the first place. Back then, Democrats were the ones assuring the world that the republic was not endangered if someone were elected to the presidency three or more times.

But this is Trump, and so it’s a vastly different story. And while the president himself has remained resolutely mum about how exactly he could run in 2028, the online store offerings prompted a new flurry of speculation. Eric Trump was photographed wearing the Trump 2028 hat; could he be thinking of a 2028 run? Or Donald Trump Jr., who has already been rumored to be considering a run?

Or is the whole thing a joke, another instance of Trump’s masterful trolling of the left? Elon Musk seems to think so, as he reposted the photo of Eric Trump wearing a Trump 2028 hat with fire and laughing emojis. The left’s hysteria over a Trump third term certainly shows up its hypocrisy and Trump derangement, and keeps it in the perpetual limbo of hating Trump rather than formulating a positive policy program that might actually appeal to Americans.

And so, in response to the Trump online store offerings, the best course of action is clear: grab some popcorn and watch the show, as the master troll drives those who would destroy him crazy once again.

This column orignially appeared in PJMedia.

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