For months now, President Trump has been pushing legislation that would federally mandate voter ID nationwide, baselessly claiming elections are rife with fraud, non-citizens are voting in extraordinary numbers, and Democrats “want to cheat,” as he put it at a news conference from his Doral golf resort in Florida on Tuesday.

House Republicans passed the bill in February, and it’s now in the Senate, where it faces long odds overcoming a 60-vote threshold in the face of united Democratic opposition.

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Over the last week, however — at the same time he’s taken America into war with Iran — Trump has added demands for the SAVE America Act that he believes will force Democrats to cave on the voter ID requirements: amendments banning trans athletes in sports and gender-affirming care for minors nationwide.

“So in order to get it, you’re going to need Democrat votes,” Trump said of the bill yesterday at Doral, where he’s hosting a two-day Republican retreat.

“We’ve added two things to it: no men in women’s sports and no transgender mutilization [sic] of our children. We don’t want our — the — it’s mutilization of our children, and we don’t want that,” he said.

Trump told Republicans gathered at the resort he wants Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) to add the provisions to the bill.

“I wanted to add two more to it because they’re, I say, 95 %, maybe 100%,” Trump claimed of polling in favor of the culture war wedges. “That should be the easiest thing to get passed that you’ve ever had. Each one, it’s ‘best of,’ best of Trump.”

As well, Trump has added a demand to end almost all mail-in voting — “no mail-in ballot scams,” as he put it in the presser. “We’re going for the gold, and we’re going to have to fight like hell.”

Trump is calculating that the trans additions will force Dems to come to the table on the voter ID and mail-in ballot provisions, as well as increase the pressure on Republican lawmakers to back the bill. But what was already a mountain of opposition to overcome among Democrats in the Senate only got steeper with the new demands, said Capitol Hill veteran Caius Willingham, a senior policy analyst at Advocates for Trans Equality.

“It seems as if he believes that attaching these anti-trans riders to the SAVE America Act would improve its chances in the Senate,” Willingham told the 19th. “Putting those riders into the SAVE America Act would actually turn off more senators than it would inspire them.” 

The additions are unlikely to overcome Senate opposition in both parties to the central premise of the bill: a step toward federal control of elections nationwide, a power delegated specifically to the states in the U.S. Constitution.

As well, the requirements for voter ID are onerous, said out Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX), who voted against the first version of the SAVE America Act in the House.

Twenty-one percent of Black Americans and 23% of Hispanic Americans don’t have access to a valid driver’s license, according to the Movement Advancement Project, compared to only 8% of white Americans. And 47% of Americans don’t currently have a valid U.S. passport, another of the bill’s mandated documents to prove citizenship. Obtaining one takes months and costs more than $130.

The Texas Democrat compared the ID requirements in the bill to a “poll tax,” a pre-Civil Rights “Jim Crow” era cost to vote, which was used to prevent poorer people and Black Americans from exercising their democratic rights.