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Trump is getting nervous. I mean really nervous, that his whole house of card could start tumbling down!

Transcript: Angry Trump Urges GOP to Rig Midterms as Polls Turn Brutal

As a striking Fox News poll suggests the GOP midterm position is deteriorating, a voting rights expert walks us through what Trump is really gearing up to attempt this fall—and how to defeat it.

The New Republic

Greg Sargent

July 24, 2026

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 exploded at Senate GOP leader John Thune during a Wednesday rally, demanding that Republicans pass voter suppression legislation immediately. This prompted an angry response from Thune, which in turn triggered MAGA rage in response. It’s no accident that this comes amid new polls showing the GOP midterm position deteriorating, including in a major Fox News survey. Trump thinks voter suppression can save the party. This is all coming to a head because the House just passed something, and the pressure on the Senate is getting brutal.

This whole situation has gotten weird and complex, so to really understand it, we’re talking to the great voting rights reporter Ari Berman of Mother Jones. Ari, always good to have you on.

[...]

Sargent: So basically, what this is starting to look like is the House is passing $10 billion to use to essentially try to get states to pass by themselves, in their state legislatures, these things in the SAVE Act.

Voter suppression mechanisms like ending vote by mail, requiring proof of citizenship. You’d do all these things through the states, and the House would try and incentivize that.

Berman: Yeah, they’re basically paying states to do voter suppression. That’s the simplest way I can explain what the House is doing.

Also the clock is running out! There is only 98 days until the elections begins and many states their elections start in October.

So you know that the courts will block it saying it is too close to the elections to require everyone to get IDs. Also other states have said the requiring a passport or a birth certificate amounts to a poll tax.

Sargent: Yeah. It looks as if Donald Trump has just gotten it into his head that if he can get this passed, it saves the midterms for Republicans. He’s just simply not capable of grasping the situation at a very fundamental level, as he so often is not, right?

Berman: Number one, every time that Trump is about to lose or on the verge of losing, he starts blaming the mechanics of voting for his loss. We saw this in 2020 with mail voting. We’re seeing it again now with the SAVE America Act.

Secondly—and this is my real concern about all of this, Greg—is that I believe he’s using the SAVE America Act as a pretext to challenge the legitimacy of the midterms. So if it does not pass, which it won’t pass, he’s going to say, we don’t have the SAVE America Act, therefore the elections were rigged, therefore I have no choice but to challenge the legitimacy of the midterms. And he’s going to point to that crazy speech he gave and say, I laid out all the evidence—even though he laid out no evidence, but he’s going to say, I laid out all the evidence, the elections were rigged, the Congress didn’t act on this, therefore I have no choice but to issue a national emergency executive order, or seize voting machines, or take some kind of dramatic intervention to mess with the midterms.

I worry what Trump will do when he is boxed it and realizes the election is lost and this time he might actually be convicted and impeached.