The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump privately raged at Republican senators during a lunch on Wednesday. He declared he won’t sign a bill reducing housing costs for the American people until Republicans end the filibuster and pass a vile piece of voter suppression legislation first. This shocked Trump’s own advisors and angered Republicans who see it as undermining their hopes in the midterms.What’s striking about all this is that ordinarily a president would let members of his own party get distance from him in order to survive the elections. But he can’t do that. And he’s likely going to be the one who gets screwed by this. We’re talking about all of it with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who has a good piece digging deep into Trump’s narcissism as the through line to all his current foibles. Amanda, good to have you back on as always.Amanda Marcotte: Thanks for having me.Sargent: So Trump was expected to sign this housing bill bringing down costs, and instead he tweeted the following: “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. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”Amanda, the SAVE Act would probably disenfranchise millions and millions of people. The real national emergency here is that Trump’s deep unpopularity will cost his party one or both chambers of Congress. This isn’t subtle, is it?Marcotte: No, not even slightly. I’m beginning to think he actually genuinely believes that the SAVE Act is what’s going to save the Republican Party in the midterm elections. And I don’t see that that’s necessarily true, because it’s got these voter ID restrictions that are so severe that it seems to me the only way you may even be able to successfully vote is if you have a passport, which I feel benefits college-educated urban voters the most of all—who tend to be Democrats.Sargent: Right. I mean, Republicans don’t want this thing to pass for a reason, and it’s not because they altruistically really want people to vote. Marcotte: We know for a fact that Republicans in the past have been all over the map when it comes to Trump’s fantasies about stealing elections. And he really—I think he doesn’t just want to steal elections because he thinks it’s the only way he’s going to win. I think he just really likes the idea of stealing elections. I think Donald Trump would rather cheat to win than just win outright. It just gets him off somehow.And so he’s gotten really fixated on the SAVE America Act, and he just cannot understand that it is not at all the slam dunk for Republicans that he thinks it is.Sargent: I agree. I think that Donald Trump sees cheating as another form of winning, as another form of getting over. But let’s put off that for a second. Again and again we’ve learned that Republicans simply did not have the votes to end the filibuster and pass this voter suppression bill. And yet, I want to highlight something from Punchbowl News reporter Andrew Desiderio. He reports that in this private meeting, Trump was in a sour mood throughout, and he again demanded that Republicans pass the so-called SAVE Act. And get this—according to this reporter, nobody pushed back.Amanda, just to reiterate, it’s typical for presidents who are this unpopular to let members of his party get some distance from him, but Trump won’t allow that because it would constitute an admission that he’s unpopular, and that can’t be allowed. And on top of that, these Republicans won’t challenge him on this. What do you make of that?Marcotte: It’s so ironic, isn’t it? He can’t admit he’s unpopular, but he’s still pushing legislation that’s premised on the idea that he’s so unpopular that he can’t win an election without it. But yes, I think it’s sad at this point in time that Republicans are afraid of at least being singled out as being anti-Trump. They voted in the Senate to stop his powers, to continue to fight the war in Iran—even though I think that’s kind of toothless at this point. But they do resist him sometimes, but always with this sort of eyeball towards never catching his evil eye, never being seen by him, or by the average Fox News viewer, as resisting Donald Trump. Because he still has this intense hold over the party even as he’s losing all of his power everywhere else in the American public. Sargent: It’s a really interesting dichotomy. And to go to your point—literally minutes before he tweeted this announcement that he won’t sign the bill until Republicans suppress millions of votes, he tweeted this: “My real poll numbers are the highest they have ever been.
