A video on the network's monitored roster, from Benny Johnson, is titled "Trump Approves NUCLEAR Option To Get SAVE America Act: 'Declare A National EMERGENCY For Voter ID...'" [2]. The phrase "nuclear option" refers to a simple majority of senators voting to change the chamber's rules and end the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold most legislation must clear. The claim, as the title puts it, is that Trump has approved or invoked that step to force through the SAVE America Act. He has not.
The video is not inventing its premise from nothing, and the fair version of events concedes that. Trump has pushed hard and publicly for exactly this move. As PBS NewsHour reported on July 27, Trump had "repeatedly urged Thune to scrap the legislative filibuster ... or find another workaround to pass the voting bill," and had written that the Senate should not "leave town" until it passes the bill, "or, far better still, TERMINATES THE FILIBUSTER" [1]. Wanting the nuclear option and demanding it in public is real. Approving or invoking it is a different claim, and it is the one the title makes.
The Senate did not take that step. Majority Leader John Thune, who would have to schedule any rules change, has said the reverse is true: Republicans do not have the votes to pass the SAVE Act or to change the rules to get around the filibuster [1]. That is a refusal, not an approval, and PBS reports it as Thune's consistent position rather than a one-day remark.
What the Senate actually recorded is a matter of public roll call. In the early hours of Aug. 8, the chamber voted on cloture for the motion to proceed to S. 5271, the photo-ID component of the package, and rejected it, 52 to 46, short of the 60 votes cloture requires [3]. The Senate's own record labels this a cloture vote under the existing rules, not a rules change and not the nuclear option [3]. Failing to end debate under the filibuster is the precise opposite of eliminating the filibuster. This desk documented that pre-dawn vote earlier this week.
The video's subtitle floats a second idea, that Trump would "declare a national emergency for voter ID." The fetched record shows Trump demanding that the Senate stay in session and terminate the filibuster, not any signed emergency declaration on voter identification. No such declaration appears in the record reviewed for this piece, and the title again presents a demand as a completed act.
The accurate sentence is narrow and available without any of the drama. Trump wants the filibuster gone to pass the SAVE Act; the Senate's Republican leader says the votes are not there and has not moved to change the rules; and the last recorded Senate action on the package was a cloture failure. The filibuster is intact. "Approves the nuclear option" describes a thing that did not happen.
