WASHINGTON — Hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to sign ​comprehensive housing legislation into law from the Capitol on Wednesday, he abruptly canceled the event, saying he won’t sign it until Congress passes a separate election security measure.

“Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT, which I consider to be a National Emergency,” he posted on his Truth Social account.

The GOP’s marquee election bill, which requires voters to prove citizenship to register and photo ID at the polls, does not have the necessary 60 votes to pass the Senate, and Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has repeatedly said his members aren’t willing to abolish the legislative filibuster to lower the threshold.

Trump’s announcement took some off guard and upended the housing victory laps lawmakers had planned. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, described it as a “complete surprise” and said “to try to make this into a political issue is wrong.”

Both parties and chambers managed to come together on housing, but “all of that’s going out of the window,” said House Financial Services ranking member Maxine Waters, D-Calif.

“All of the creative work that we worked on and negotiated for over a year [has] now been undermined by the president of the United States,” Waters said at a Wednesday subcommittee hearing.

Both parties hoped to use the housing package as a pillar of their midterm messaging around affordability.

House Republicans were in the middle of a press conference touting the housing bill and other agenda items when the president sent his post, with Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., promising they would be “the party that governs and delivers.”

Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged that Trump was “delaying” the housing signing to pursue his voter ID priorities, saying at the news conference: “He has a window of time before he has to sign a bill. He’s going to use a little bit more of that window of time.”

Trump has not explicitly said he would veto the housing bill, meaning that if he simply doesn’t sign it within a period of 10 days — excluding Sunday — it would still become law without his signature. One potential wrinkle in that 10-day clock is that it doesn’t start until the enrolled bill has been officially “presented” to the president, and it wasn’t clear whether that had happened yet as of Trump’s social media post at 10:26 a.m.

The president has previously threatened not to sign other bills into law until SAVE has passed but didn’t hold firm to that threat.

The signing about-face made for a tense mood ahead of Trump’s expected appearance at a Senate Republican luncheon Wednesday, where the voter ID package was anticipated to be a main topic of conversation as it continues to derail Thune and leadership’s agenda.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., a vocal proponent of the voter ID bill, called it “leverage” and said he supported Trump’s strategy of pulling out of the signing ceremony.

“We need to get it done. It’ll work,” he said.

Democrats were quick to seize on the delay, describing Trump as indifferent to what Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called a “housing crisis.”

“Can I underline crisis three times?” she asked. “We have a bill that Republicans and Democrats have built. It is good for urban America, rural America, first-time homebuyers, renters, seniors, families that are expanding.”

“It’s a bill about doing good things, and Donald Trump says he just doesn’t care.”

—Jacob Fulton and Mark Schoeff Jr. contributed to this report.

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