No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen - Trump refuses to sign his own party’s housing bill

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Trump thumbs his nose at his own voters by refusing to sign the housing bill that he promised them on the campaign trail. Brian interviews historian Heather Cox Richardson about the threats to democracy.Pre-order The Day After & get book tour tickets: https://www.harpercollins.com/pages/thedayafterWritten by Brian Tyler CohenProduced by Sam GraberRecorded in Los Angeles, CASee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Trump thumps his nose at his own voters by refusing to sign the housing bill that he promised them on the campaign trail. And I interview historian Heather Cox Richardson about the thrust of democracy that we're contending with right now. I'm Brian Taylor Cohen, and you're listening to No Lie. Trump just torched his own campaign promise in writing on his own social media platform and somehow made it sound like a badge of honor. So he wrote, quote, I will not sign the housing bill, which has been fully approved by Congress and sent to the White House in protest over the fact that the United States Senate is not capable of pass. the Save America Act, which is polling at 97% with the Republican Party and very high with the non-politician Democrats. And he goes on, but I think you can already glean from that gem what the rest of it sounds like. So here's the deal. The housing bill passed the House 358 to 22 and

passed the Senate 85 to 5. These are numbers that are so lopsided. They are basically unanimous by D.C. standards on an issue that Trump literally ran on, like over and over again on the campaign he said this. We will open up new tracks of federal land for large-scale housing construction so that we can get housing on the market. Housing affordability crisis. It's too expensive to build the homes and they're building them and they cost a fortune. Cut to, Congress delivers him exactly that, a sweeping, genuinely bipartisan housing package

meant to lower prices, speed up home building and rein in the corporate landlords buying up single-family homes. And the second it lands on his desk, he shoves it. At which point there is a new tune that he's singing. What are your plans for the housing bill, Mr. President? I don't know. I think it's so unimportant by compared to the Save America. And why?

Why sink your own legislative achievement? Why undermine your own promise to your own voters? Because he wants to use it as a hostage to force through an unrelated bill. He is holding your housing cost hostage for political leverage for himself. Now, Trump is going to claim that the Save America Act is a about voter ID, it's not. At its core, this bill is federal control over how all 50 states register and verify voters, a nationwide proof of citizenship mandate, forcing states to hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security, a functional end to mail-in voting

outside of just a narrow list of exceptions. So this would amount to the federal government consolidating authority that has sat with the states for the entire history of this country and putting in the hands of an administration that's already shown exactly what it wants to do with that power. And in case there's any doubt, Trump is so ham-handed that he outright admitted it. We can only lose the midterms if we allow ourselves to lose the midterms, if we are foolish, stupid, and unwise. But if we terminate the filibuster, as we should do, and immediately vote for the Save America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years.

we do that. We're not going to lose an election for 100 years. Yeah. So nobody who genuinely believes in fair, secure elections tells you that the payoff is 100 years of uninterrupted victory. Like, that's not a security measure. That is a permanent lock on power. When the architect of a massive voter suppression bill tells you the point is that his side stops losing, believe him. And that really is the whole story here.

Trump is not gearing up to win the midterms on the merits, on the economy, that he broke, on wars that he restarted, on promises that he shredded, he knows he can't. His own approval numbers and the inflation numbers and his mounting scandals, all of that shows that he does not have a winning midterm message to run on. So instead of making a case to voters, he's just trying to rig the rules of the game before a single vote is cast. He's looking to gut the filibuster, nationalized election administration, restrict the very ballots that tend to favor the party that he is opposing, and do it all under the friendly

branding of election integrity. When a president would rather blow up his own party's housing than let a real election happen on a level playing field, that tells you that he's not preparing to win the midterms. He's preparing to make sure that it doesn't matter whether or not he does. Next up is my interview with Heather Cox Richardson, but a quick note and an important one, my new book, The Day After, is coming out this week. So if you'd like to support my work, please do me a huge favor. Order it in the link in the show notes, or you can go to bryantylercoen.com slash book.

or find it anywhere that books are sold. It's called The Day After. And I'll also be on tour. So if you live in New York, D.C., or L.A., now is the time to grab those tickets because it's coming up just days from now. I'm going to be with Jim Acosta in D.C. on July 14th. I'm going to be with Don Lemon in New York on July 15th. And I'm going to be with John L.A. on July 18th. So I'm going to put the link, same website, to both the book and the tour tickets in the show notes of this episode. Again, you can also go to Brian Tyler Cohen.com slash book. Please help support my work if you can. I really appreciate it.

Okay, here's my interview with Heather Cox Richardson. No Lie is brought to you by Zock Doc. Have you ever put off making an appointment due to phone anxiety or endless phone tag, only to finally call and find out that the next opening is months away? I don't know why I'm newly surprised every time, but it is a fact of life that certain doctors are not available for a really long time, which is not great because generally when you are looking for a doctor, you're looking for one now.

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Your health matters and taking care of yourself shouldn't be complicated. Find and book the right doctor with Zockdoc. Head to Zock.com slash BTC to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's ZOC, do-o-C.com slash BTC. I am joined now by a dear friend of mine, Heather Cox Richardson. Heather, thank you so much for joining me. I wanted to talk to you today because we have seen the latest iteration of one of Donald Trump's broken promises, and that was with this housing bill, something that Trump himself,

ran on in the 2024 election, handed to him on a silver platter by his own Republican colleagues, and now he's made an announcement today that he's not interested in signing it because he wants to use it as a hostage to pass the Save America Act. We'll get a little bit into the attacks on voting in a moment here, but can I have your reaction to the fact that Donald Trump had made these promises to people, not just on housing, but certainly on housing, and yet refuses to deliver on his own campaign promises? First of all, it's great to see you. I love your work. I'm really glad to be here, and we should do it more often. But second of all, one of the things that jumped out to me in 2024 was that Trump was promising everything to everybody in a way that made

it very clear to me he didn't really intend to go through with anything that wasn't on his personal agenda. And I think that's exactly what we have been seeing. This housing bill, though, is really interesting because it passed on a bipartisan basis with very large majorities and had been in the works for years. It's actually a really popular bill. And his declaration that he's not going to sign it until he gets what he wants, I was trying to think about this. I think, at least in my experience, which is not, you know, small, I don't think I can think of another president who has refused to sign a bill because he is holding it hostage. And that, you know, when I looked at the fact he wasn't going to sign this or says he's not going to sign it, it's

really a larger picture of what he's doing in that office, which has very little to do with this traditional sense of governance, you know, working with Congress, working with the executive branch, working with what can get through the courts to actually do things that are good for the American people. The fact that he would take this and hold it hostage is a really different concept of what it means to be an American president than I think we've ever seen before. I think it's bigger than just him being a baby. I think it's his declaration that he just does not care what is good for the American people or what Congress thinks is good for the American people or what the executive branch agencies

might think is good for the American people. He just wants to stay in power. I think that's the perfect point. You know, a lot of people were saying, well, this is Donald Trump giving up on the midterms because, you know, he won't sign this housing bill in very much the same way that he promised lower prices. Prices have surged. He promised cheaper groceries. beef is more expensive. He promised inflation would go down. Inflation's up 30% since Biden left office. He promised to release the Epstein files. They've not been released. He promised no new foreign wars. Of course, we're engaged in a new foreign war. So this is him giving up on the midterms. But in fact, I don't think it's that. I think it's the total opposite. I think this is him

planting his flag on trying to anti-democratically win the midterms by focusing solely not on winning on the merits, but on winning by virtue of trying to get the Save America Act. passed by trying to engage in this anti-democratic behavior where he tries to ban mail-in voting, where he tries to usurp federal control of the state-run elections. All of these things are him not giving up on the midterms. It's him giving up on winning on the merits. Well, I agree with you. And I would put it less charitably than that.

I don't think he's ever been interested in the kind of governance that an American president is supposed to do. He's trying to steal the midterms. He's trying to steal the next election as well. It's not just that. Save America Act that we're talking about, which, you know, experts across the board say is going to suppress the vote pretty dramatically. In the last week, he has had his Department of Justice right to all 50 election officials in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia, warning them that

they run the risk of criminal indictments if, in fact, any non-citizens vote in their states or in Washington, D.C., to which, you know, the lieutenant governor of Utah, who's a Republican, said, this is so far out of your lane. And then, and then it was it yesterday, he went ahead and fired the top Democratic election officials in a nonpartisan or a bipartisan agency that's designed to oversee state and local elections, make it easier for them to run those elections, doing things like certifying the voting machines. And then when he, when he did that, the Republican who was still on the committee, it was a four-person committee, the other Republican resigned. I think it was back in April. When the two Democrats were fired, he resigned as well. So now we have

lost that commission. And that, you know, this juggernaut toward, I'm just going to steal this election, I think is building. And I think we should take it extraordinarily seriously because we know he doesn't take no for an answer. We've had that demonstrated, and I think we're headed in exactly that direction again in 2026. No, I would be remiss to ask you, while I have you in particular, is there any comparable situation in history that we can look at at this particular moment where we are kind of teetering on the precipice of is this upcoming election where Trump has full control of government and is obviously unbridled in terms of, of what he's willing to do, where we can see, you know, based on historical precedent,

what's happened. Looks a lot like the American South in 1874, 1876, when the unconstructed Southern Democrats were determined to destroy the possibility that Republicans, both black and white, and these are all going to be men in the 1870s, could vote in those elections. And they did sort of voter suppression stuff like literally holding target shoots next to Republican political rallies. And, you know. Yes, the modern iteration of that is deploying ice agents to the polls, which Republicans

refuse to rule out. Yes, deploying ice agents. Now, there's another piece of this, though, that when you say, do we have a precedent? And one of the reasons I'm trying to sort of warn people and make sure they really understand this is happening. And by the way, people are fighting back on a number of different places against this. This is not like I've discovered something nobody knew, right? Mark Elias has been who's with Democracy Docket has been fighting this forever.

State attorneys general are fighting at Republicans as well as Democrats. There are plenty of people whose skin is already in the game there. But what this really reminds me of, do you remember, and I'm not going to have the date off the top of my head, but in January, early January, or very late December of 2020 or 2021, right there, right after the Christmas slash New Year's holiday, all living former defense secretaries posted that letter in the Washington Post, warning the members of the military that they must obey their oath to the Constitution. And I remember seeing that and being like,

what's getting all those people together over the holidays? They know something. And that every time I see one of these, another one of these, dominoes dropping. I think of those men who were, and I think they were all men, maybe there was a woman in there as well, but I think of them all coming together and saying, listen, we know this world well enough that we're seeing stuff we really don't like and we're calling it out. And, you know, I sort of feel like those of us who are doing that now are walking in their footsteps. And with luck, people will look at us in five months and say, hey, look, they were all chicken

littles. He was never going to do anything and they all look like weenies. Yeah. I hear by volunteer to be weenie in chief on my concerns over this. Yeah, I completely agree. Look, best case scenario, we look alarmist because the alternative is we're in a situation where Trump has deployed further tools to consolidate more power and undermine our ability to have a free and fair election. And we know, as you said, that he's willing to go to any length possible to make that happen. The fact that he engaged in an insurrection.

Like, I know that it becomes so normalized because we've talked about it so much, but there are no lengths that he will that he will not go to in order to consolidate power for himself. And I think that's a, that, that is an example of exactly that. Do you, you know, when I'm sure people ask you this question. And again, you're the right person to ask because I think it's not just based on what's happening right now, but on your extensive knowledge of what's happened in the past. Do you have confidence as we head toward November that we have the tools at our disposal in the pro-democracy ecosystem to prevent.

Trump from appealing to his worst instincts. Oh, I do. I actually think that the great advantage we have over the American South in the 1870s and the 1880s is that we have instantaneous communications that enable us to call out the things that are happening as soon as they are happening rather than learning about it two months later after the damage has already been done. You know, I will say in this moment, though, as we're looking forward and you keep talking about Trump, there's some things that are alarming and unprecedented that I don't have any idea how to factor in. And one of those is that Trump is increasingly mentally unstable.

And I don't think you have to look any farther than, well, whatever he did a minute and a half ago, but really what he did in Ankara, Turkey, that whole experience with the NATO summit at the beginning of this week. That was somebody who should not be in charge of anything, let alone the United States of America. But that suggests that he is not the only one who is making these moves toward,

consolidating power. And watching him act sometimes makes me feel as if he is cover, not knowingly, but he is cover for somebody else making sure those things are in power. And I don't know quite how we deal with that as well going forward. So there is that that weirdness of how much is this Trump and how much of it is this particular moment and the people who are surrounding him. And of course, we've never had this before. It's very hard to know how this is going to play out, except maybe if he looked like at Woodrow Wilson, but rather than holding on to power so he could pass it on,

he made sure there was nobody who came after him. I mean, he himself came out and said, if he's able to pass the legislation that he's trying to shoehorn through, that Republicans will never lose another election for 100 years. And I understand he makes these statements purposefully to give himself a little bit of plausible deniability. And he can say, oh, well, the reason I said, that is because Democrats are cheating and we had five million undocumented immigrants who've

voted in California. And if not for that, the entire country would have had 50 states that would have voted for Trump and Republicans. But the reality of what he's saying is that there is some truth. Like he lets slip some truth in what he's saying in the sense that he's looking to consolidate power from the states into the federal government so that they can interfere enough so that they can consolidate power. And so that they're only. the ability for Democrats to be able to win. Trump and Republicans don't think that Democrats have the right to win elections. And they let slip the truth sometimes because they've just become so accustomed to committing

corruption or criminality in broad daylight. You know, that's a, that is a really good point. And, you know, in the past, I've really looked at how the Republicans constructed this idea that Democrats were illegitimate. And it's actually a really interesting study. But there was a wonderful write-up a number of days ago now, and maybe you can remember who did it. Unfortunately, I can't. That talked about the degree to which the American media assumes that the Republicans have the right to rule and that the Democrats are upstarts who don't.

And their real comparison was the idea that even though former President Joe Biden was, as somebody said, a gaff machine from the time he first sprang onto the scene of American politics, any words that he meant. messed up became an instant examination into his, into his cognitive health. Whereas Trump is out there talking about the Islamic Republic of Japan and, you know, calling Volodomir Zelensky, President Putin, and nobody's calling it out. I shouldn't say nobody, but they're acting as if this is okay, and that is in part as this person analyzed because there's this assumption that the Republicans are in power naturally and should be there. And so their bar is significantly lower than the Republicans, than the Democrats, who have to get into that position and overcome that sense that they shouldn't be there.

No lie is brought to you by Zbiotics. So let's face it. After a night with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. I'm in my mid-30s, but I work in politics, which means I'm basically aging in dog years. And with that, went my tolerance. So basically, when I go out, I have to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day until I found pre-alcohol. Zbiotics pre-alcohol probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic.

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a night out, I can confidently plan on being on camera without worry. And trust me, people would notice if something was out of the ordinary, I read the comments every day, I would know. So look, July is packed with barbecues, fireworks, late weekends, and late nights with friends. Keep the good times rolling into the next day. Drink pre-alcohol before you go out and wake up ready for whatever Sunday brings. Remember to head to zbiotics.com slash BTC and use code BTC at check-e out for 15% off. I should also note that in terms of the normalization of Trump's deteriorating mental state, the fact that the guy is announcing, forget going, but announcing that he is going for these

cognitive exams, which are just basically dementia tests, three times a year being administered by 22 doctors, first of all, to go that many times signals that perhaps there's a problem on the horizon here. But second of all, to brag that you are dementia, that you are passing. said dementia test is not exactly, I think is indicative of why the dementia test is needed in the first place. So I will say that, but I think that is a very smart point about Republicans feeling like they are entitled to power. And so the bar is that much lower. And we have seen that at play not just in terms of how they govern, but also how the media treats them. And I think that's owed in large parts of the fact that, you know, there is so much avowedly right-wing media.

and they're perfectly content to serve as propaganda arms for the GOP. And then we have a quote unquote liberal media. We had for so long only a liberal media, mainstream media, that viewed their role as being neutral arbiters. And so they would engage in both sidesism. So inherently, when right-wing media presented some idea, they felt an obligation to cover it and treat it with good faith. And because we didn't have avowedly progressive media for so long,

I mean, just now is when it's getting its feet off the ground and you know, you and the work you do is a testament to that. But for so long that asymmetry existed where everything that they put forward, propaganda, even false though it may be, was treated as legitimate by a liberal media that felt like it needed to bend over backwards to confer some goodwill to the other side. So do we have time for me to give you the history of that idea of liberal media? Absolutely. So there really was never the kind of media.

that the right wing described. The argument that the media was liberal, and I'm going to put a capital L on that, actually really comes out of the 1950s, and especially from a characterization that's put in a book called McCarthy and his enemies in 1954, written by L. Brent Bezell and William F. Buckley, Jr. And what they argued in that book was that everybody who thought that the government had a role to play in regulating business and providing a basic social safety net and promoting infrastructure and protecting civil rights and underpinning rules-based international order. Everybody said that would be Republicans, independents, and Democrats, all, the vast majority of Americans, were capital L liberals.

They tried to turn it into the idea that it was a slippery slope from them to capital C communists. And the only people who were true Americans were the people that they called conservatives, who became known as movement conservatives because they were a political. movement that called themselves conservative. They actually weren't ideologically conservative. They were quite radical. But what happens is that characterization of everybody but the far right as some sort of liberal bad thing becomes an article of faith among that radical right. And they keep insisting that anybody who exercises fact-based evidence like the Enlightenment calls for was their own kind of group that was really dangerous. And so,

So in 1971, you get the Powell memo, which is where the man who goes on to become Justice Powell writes for the Chamber of Commerce, the idea that the only way that radical right is going to get power back is to take over the universities and the media. And from that idea that the liberal media is somehow on the left, which it never was. It was always fact-based, that that's a bad thing you get by the 1990s the rise of the Fox News Channel with the idea that it is fair and balanced. And what they mean by that is that everybody else, Republicans, independents, Democrats, are going to have their media that is fact-based. But the right wing has to have its media, too, which is ideologically based.

It was explicitly not fact-based. But they constantly pressured that liberal media to include the, their point of view. And now, as you say, they have become a both-sides thing where they will present, you know, this is the facts of the case. But here's the ideology coming from the radical rights, saying, for example, that climate change isn't real. And we're stuck in this moment, and we finally have gotten the rise of independent media, which I don't like being called on the left at all. I am not on the left. What I am is fact-based. You know, and the facts say climate change is real. And here are the, you know, here are the things we need to adjust.

And the facts say that Donald Trump is corrupt, you know, and that is not a political position. That is based in the facts. And so that whole idea of, you know, the liberal media being a negative thing, it was really just a smear from the radical right to say, well, they're based in facts. And I think the fact that there is a distinction between fact-based media and right-wing media that is actually inherently, an indictment of right-wing media that you can call fact-based media the liberal media or the antidote to what they had. I think that is as big an indictment of what they're doing as you could possibly find. But look, I think in terms of fact-based media, nobody does it better than you. And it's been an honor and a pleasure to be able to speak with you today. And for folks who are

just learning who you are, few though those may be, where can they see and hear more from you? Letters from an American is on Substack and Facebook. got a YouTube channel and I'm on Instagram, sort of all the usual places. All right. Well, I'm going to link those in the post description of this video. I'm going to link the YouTube channel right here on the screen. So if you're watching this, please go ahead, click right now, subscribe to Heather's YouTube channel and let's help grow this fact-based ecosystem. Heather, as always, thank you so much for taking the time. Always a pleasure. No lie is brought to you by Simply Safe. So imagine it's the 4th of July holiday.

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just by going to simplysafe.com slash BTC. Hurry because there's no safe like SimplySafe. Thanks again to Heather. That's it for this episode. Talk to you later. You've been listening to No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen. Produced by Sam Graber, music by Wellesie, and interviews edited for YouTube by Nicholas Nicotera. If you want to support the show,

please subscribe on your preferred podcast app and leave a five-star rating and a review. And as always, you can find me at Brian Tyler Cohen on all of my other channels, or you can go to bryantaylorcoen.com to learn more.