The following is a lightly edited transcript of the March 16 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.Republican senators are privately very upset with Donald Trump and MAGA. They don’t understand why Trump keeps prodding them to pass voter suppression legislation when they don’t have the votes to get it done. In fact, Republicans fear that their string of losses at the state level bodes very badly for the midterms, and they really want to focus on the economy. Trump won’t let them.We think this is a telling moment because it shows that Republicans really do expect to face real elections this fall—and it doesn’t look like Trump can get his way and cheat his way through this. Is that too optimistic? We’re talking about all this with Tara McGowan, a former Democratic strategist who’s a shrewd observer of politics as the publisher of Courier Newsroom. Tara, nice to have you on.Tara McGowan: Always good to be with you, Greg.Sargent: So Trump wants Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which is a truly disgusting piece of voter suppression legislation. It’s already passed the House, but doesn’t have close to 60 votes to pass the Senate. Trump and MAGA want Republicans in the Senate to use a talking filibuster to pass it. Tara, can you explain how this Trump-MAGA strategy is supposed to work?McGowan: I can do my best, Greg. Just trying to explain any Trump-led strategies these days is very difficult. The SAVE Act is horrific voter suppression. The issue at hand now is that after it passed the House, John Thune, the majority leader of the Republican Party in the Senate, has said repeatedly and explicitly he does not have the votes to get the SAVE Act passed. That is making the president and the administration increasingly desperate, and they are calling first to get rid of the filibuster—that procedural motion that Thune has always stood against [repealing]. This is not the first time Trump has called for that, to try to get his agenda passed by a Republican-only line vote and majority.And so now what’s happening—and this gets a little convoluted—basically there is another procedural option to get around the 60-vote threshold with a talking filibuster, which would require Democrats to hold the floor, as we have seen occasionally and recently in other situations. They would need to hold the floor to debate this bill and talk about their opposition to it. But they essentially have to hold the floor. And when they cease holding the floor of the chamber, then the majority party can bring the measure to a vote and pass it on a simple majority instead of requiring that 60-vote threshold. That’s how I understand it.But even that, Senator Thune has come out and said he does not have the votes to push the talking filibuster to get the SAVE Act passed. Sargent: The strategy of getting rid of the filibuster itself doesn’t have enough Republican support to pass, because a few senators—maybe more than a few Republican senators—oppose getting rid of the traditional filibuster. And the talking filibuster strategy can’t work either, because Democrats would probably relish the opportunity to hold the floor for pretty much forever. They could do what Cory Booker did recently and get a ton of attention on what’s going on with Trump’s economy, with his immigration crackdown. McGowan: We have millions of Epstein files that we could do story time with America for months—really, Greg, on end. Sargent: That would be absolutely something that they would do. And I think smarter Republicans know that it would be an absolute catastrophe to let Democrats tie things up that way, especially when Republicans want to be focused on the economy. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board ripped into the strategy, calling it basically a mirage and a fantasy, and pointing out that Democrats would love to jump at the chance to draw attention to both themselves and to all the failures on Trump’s watch. So it’s not happening.McGowan: Nope, that’s exactly right. And we’re even seeing—right?—so the desperation is spreading. Senator John Cornyn of Texas is in a fight for his political life in a runoff in the Republican primary in Texas against Ken Paxton. And so he has actually changed his position around the filibuster and the talking filibuster to try to appease Trump and get his endorsement, because Trump has so far withheld endorsing either of them. And like everything else in this administration, everything to President Trump is a bargaining chip to get his agenda passed, which is always about him, right?He knows—and Mike Johnson, the House speaker, came out after the State of the Union and even said—if and when Republicans lose the House in the midterms this year, that is game over for this Trump administration or any Trump agenda.