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. Thank you.”
So one minute his poll numbers are showing that he’s astronomically popular, and then the next minute he’s saying, goddamn it, please prevent lots and lots of people from voting, otherwise we’re going to get killed. There you have it right there, right? That’s all of it right there.
Marcotte: One of the wildest things about watching Donald Trump in the second term is seeing how much worse his narcissism has gotten. I didn’t think it was possible, honestly, in the first term, but the spiral that he’s in—he’s talked himself into incoherence. I don’t know if it’s that he’s 80 years old and he’s just falling apart, or if it’s just that the stress of the situation is getting to him, or if it’s a combination of those two things.
But he ping-pongs wildly between the two problems that narcissists have, which is this overblown sense of self and this constant insecurity. And so it is just that. Like, I can’t win this election without cheating—I’m also the most popular president of all time. And it’s like, you’ve got to choose, man.
Sargent: Yeah, well—you’d think, although maybe MAGA doesn’t have to choose. Let’s listen to MAGA Senator Tommy Tuberville talk about Trump’s demand that Republicans pass this voter suppression legislation.
Tommy Tuberville (voiceover): If we don’t do something with the filibuster and we don’t get things passed, it’ll be the last time we’ll have a Republican president or Republican Senate or a House. That’s how fast this country’s going down to communism. And we need to stop it. We can stop it. It’s—the ball’s in our court. President Trump said it, ball’s in our court.
Sargent: I mean, there you have it, Amanda. Things are so bad that Republicans will never win an election again if they can’t figure out how to prevent millions and millions of Americans from voting. Could that be clearer?
Marcotte: This was a wild interview for a couple of reasons. One, the word “communist” is just a blunt dog whistle to mean, you know, non-white conservatives—not conservatives, rather. He’s using demographic change as a scare point. So there’s genuinely white supremacy right there. It’s right under the surface. And he would probably argue with me, but I think it’s communists, really communists. They keep putting Zohran Mamdani’s face up when they say the word communist. So we all know what’s going on there.
And two—if you are in a democratic system, and I know that Tommy Tuberville is not the brightest of guys, but if you’re in a democratic system and you can’t win an election, too bad, so sad. Your job is to change your party so that you can win elections. And it’s also delusional.
I mean, unfortunately, Republicans are the ones who have an unfair advantage in our electoral system. They’re the ones who punch way above their weight, who often lose the popular vote and yet somehow still win elections because of our Electoral College and Senate disproportionality and other problems like that. So this entire thing was just bonkers.
But it goes to show that they’re trying to whip the base into a state of hysteria over this. And you do have to wonder why, because it feels like it only is to please Trump—because the voters that Tommy Tuberville is speaking to are some of the people that would probably be disenfranchised.
Working-class white, suburban white, rural white voters are not likely to have the level of ID that is required to vote under this system. Who has their birth certificate in their house? I do. But I’m a college-educated urban voter. I’m the kind of person who has that ID.
Sargent: I want to highlight a couple of other tidbits. The Post reports that this announcement surprised even Trump’s own advisors, who had spent the morning touting this legislation. And the Times reports that Republicans were shocked by this announcement, and even that they regard it as an effort to undermine their chances in the midterms. Senate Majority Leader John Thune “appeared almost dazed,” The Times says.
I just want to reiterate—Republicans know that this is absolutely terrible for them, yet they still can’t say it that way. They have to dance around the fact that this absolute madman is fucking them in every possible way he can.
Marcotte: It really gets to the heart of a conflict he’s having with the GOP during the midterms, which is they understand they can’t steal this election. They understand that they have to win seats by appealing to voters and trying to get votes. And so the whole point of this housing bill was to try to address the affordability concerns that are motivating voters to turn against Republicans in this election. It’s very standard politics, right?
And Donald Trump’s attitude is like, why bother with all that stuff? I don’t care about any of that. And he’s almost mad at voters for making him have to care about their stupid poor people concerns about affording housing and gasoline. And so he’s just like, why don’t we just steal it? Can we just please steal it?
But they can’t steal it. This bill is not a way to steal it. There’s not a mechanism to steal it. And he just can’t get past the idea that there’s got to be a way to steal it.
And we know that he thinks like this because this is what caused him to behave the way he did in the run-up to the riot on January 6. He just can’t get it out of his head that there’s got to be a cheat code, there is an “I win” button hidden somewhere.
Sargent: Right. I really like that idea that he just wants to cheat his way through rather than change the policies and change the approach. Because again, I think that gets at the deep narcissism here, because doing that would be an admission that he’s failed. And that isn’t allowed.
And yet at the same time, the need to cheat to win is also an admission that he’s failed, but he’s too narcissistic to admit that to himself. It’s like there are so many layers of narcissism here, you can’t even penetrate it. And that’s sort of the nature of narcissism, right? It’s like the turtles going on top of the turtles. It’s just a bottomless pit, in essence, isn’t it?
Marcotte: Yeah, they get caught in these cycles of shame and bombast. And unfortunately for Republicans, he’s caught them all up in it. But I think that it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving group of people. Here’s the thing—if they held hands and jumped together, they’d be fine. And in fact, in a sense, they’re going to have to do that on the SAVE America Act. It’d be wild if they try to pass it just to placate him.
But anybody who’s ever dealt with a narcissist in real life knows that you can’t just constantly placate them. You eventually have to give them the boot, or at least set a strong boundary with them, because they will continue to do this stuff. And I don’t know, these Republicans just can’t do it because they know he’ll single out anyone who turns against him. But again, the answer to that is solidarity—not to sound like a leftist.
Sargent: Right. Yeah, exactly.
Marcotte: Always to sound like a leftist, actually.
Sargent: Well, I just want to highlight how this is backfiring for Trump in every conceivable way. It shows the voters that Trump doesn’t care about people’s economic struggles, and that will drive down his approval, which is the coin of the realm in midterms. It prevents Republicans from getting distanced from the unpopular president.
And all of this makes it more likely, rather than less, that Trump and the GOP lose control of one or both chambers of Congress, which means investigations of Trump. His own narcissism is fucking him, basically.
Marcotte: Every single time. I mean, it’s just like the Reflecting Pool, right? He got it in his head that the way to prove his greatness was to fix this pool. And instead he made it much, much worse. And now he’s panicking and denying what everyone can see, which is that he failed miserably. And we’re getting a preview from that of what’s going to happen after they lose the midterms, I suspect.
Sargent: Yes, that’s going to be really interesting. So Amanda, how do you see this playing out? I mean, I really hate to dismiss the possibility that they could pass the SAVE Act. Do you think it’s possible? And if not, how do you see it unfolding?
Marcotte: I agree. I don’t want to dismiss the possibility, because the lengths that the GOP will go to to placate Trump and his ridiculous ideas have been fairly bottomless. That said, they usually tend to be more passive than active when they disagree with him.
There’s a reason that he just goes around Congress to do things like start the Iran war—which is, he does still, I think, on some level understand that they might actually get in the way if they’re required to take action to do what he says. They’ll passively go along with it.
But I imagine whipping the votes on this is going to be really hard when you’re talking to congressional members who are like, look, dude, none of my voters have the level of ID that you expect. You’re going to ban all the married women from voting because their married name doesn’t match their birth certificate. The SAVE America Act is truly ridiculous. And I think that’s one of the obstacles here.
But they’re going to try to—I feel like we’re going to continue to see what’s happening, which is they’re not going to pass it, but they’re going to try to publicly placate him, because he’s also very shallow. And as long as you’re praising him and telling him he’s the greatest president of all time, he can be distracted, like a cat with a toy.
Sargent: Yes, and that’s the ultimate irony—that if Trump gets his way, it backfires even more dramatically for him and the GOP than if he doesn’t.
Marcotte: Yeah. But I mean, we should genuinely oppose this, because we really don’t want a system where only a small percentage of people can vote because they’re the kind of people who have all their paperwork in big files in their cabinet.
Sargent: No, a hundred percent. Well, we really got to hope it doesn’t pass—and it does look like it won’t pass. What do you think’s going to happen? How are you feeling about the midterms these days?
Marcotte: I feel like a lot of the people that are flirting with voting for the Democrat in red states will panic and at the last minute find their—”James Talarico said God is non-binary” excuse to vote for the Republican. So I’m always worried about that.
But the very fact that there are people in places like Texas and Iowa considering switching their vote from Trump to a Democrat for this midterm election is pretty significant. And I think that it’s possible that we win the Senate. I think we’re definitely going to win the House.
Sargent: It sure looks that way right now. And I got to say, Trump is doing everything possible to drive his own approval down as much as he possibly can, which I guess—thanks, Donald. Amanda Marcotte, thanks so much for coming on. Always great to talk to you.
Marcotte: Thanks for having me, Greg.
