Donald Trump wants the world to see him as strong. He wants Americans to believe that force is leadership, that intimidation is strategy, that cruelty is toughness, and that democracy is secure so long as he is the one controlling it. But when we step back and examine what Trump is actually doing, at home and abroad, the pattern is unmistakable. His egocentric, narcissistic style is not making the United States safer, freer, or more respected. It is making this country more brittle, more divided, more authoritarian in instinct, and more dangerous to millions of people here and around the world.

The place to begin is the so-called SAVE America Act, because it captures the entire Trump method in one piece of legislation. It begins with a lie, wraps itself in patriotic branding, targets a largely fictional problem, and then imposes real burdens on real people in ways that can strip them of rights. The bill is formally called the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, and it passed the House before moving to the Senate, where Republicans opened debate under heavy pressure from Trump even though they lacked the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Trump has treated the bill as a top priority and said he would withhold support from other legislation until it passes.

The SAVE Act is sold as common-sense election security. Its backers talk about citizenship, fraud prevention, and public confidence. But the evidence behind this sales pitch is paper-thin. Study after study has found that voter fraud in the United States is rare, and that noncitizen voting is especially rare. The Brennan Center’s review of the evidence calls noncitizen voting “vanishingly rare,” and Brookings’ review of even the Heritage Foundation’s election-fraud database concluded that the number of proven cases is minuscule compared with the hundreds of millions of ballots cast, with no evidence of any effect on national outcomes.

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