Republicans are swimming for a midterms lifeboat. Trump keeps pulling it further away.

This is an adapted excerpt from the June 25 episode of “The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi.”

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There’s a moment in every relationship where the people who have been covering for you stop covering for you. Not because they had a change of heart, but because the math changed. And when it comes to Donald Trump and the Republican Party, we may be there.

On Thursday we learned the inflation rate rose to 4.1%. These are May numbers, meaning they don’t yet capture June’s gas prices, which the Iran war pushed higher. That means the number next month may be worse. 

No one needs to know this number; Americans feel it every time they fill up their tank, buy groceries or pay their rent. That is what moves voters in November, and the party responsible right now is the Republican Party — because they control everything.

Against that backdrop, what is Trump focused on? Not prices. Not the economy. But a voter suppression bill.

Before we get to that, we must understand what is happening to the Republican Party right now, because it isn’t just one thing, it is a pattern.

Within the last week, Tucker Carlson and former Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene both renounced the Republican Party, citing the Iran war as a betrayal of “America First” values. Populist podcasters who helped build the MAGA media machine, like Theo Von, Tim Dillon and Candace Owens, have turned fiercely critical of the administration.

Then there’s the Jeffrey Epstein issue. Four Republicans in the House called themselves “the Bravehearts” and forced the release of the Epstein files — documents Trump didn’t want released, but ones the American public had been promised. 

Of those four Republicans, only one will return to Congress next session. In May, Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky lost the most expensive House primary in American history, with more than $34 million spent against him. Earlier this year, Greene resigned from Congress. South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace didn’t run for re-election and just lost her gubernatorial race after Trump withheld his endorsement. That means Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado is the only one likely to remain in Congress next year.

That is the context for this moment: a president using the full force of his political machine to punish members of his own party who ask inconvenient questions, while the economy worsens and the party he is supposed to be leading heads into the most consequential midterm of his presidency without a single kitchen table win to show for it.

Republicans needed something to take home to voters before November — and they almost had it in the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, the most comprehensive housing legislation in decades. It would increase the supply of homes, bring down costs and restrict the large institutional investors who have been buying up single-family homes and pricing ordinary Americans out of their own neighborhoods. 

It passed both chambers with overwhelming bipartisan support, margins large enough to override a presidential veto: 166 Republican representatives voted for it, and 42 Republican senators voted for it. 

They did so because they understood what their constituents understand: that you can’t afford to rent, you can’t afford to buy and nobody in Washington has done anything about it.

This was their answer. It was their evidence that they showed up. Then Trump set it on fire. The president now says he won’t sign the legislation until the Senate passes the SAVE America Act.

Let’s be precise about what that bill actually is, because the housing bill and this voting bill are two entirely different things, and it matters that you understand both. 

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The SAVE America Act would require every American to show documentary proof of citizenship — a passport or a birth certificate, not a driver’s license, not a military ID — just to register to vote. The Senate has voted on it and it failed, 48-50. Republicans didn’t even have a simple majority, let alone the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.

The Republican senators who voted “no” weren’t doing it to protect Democratic voters. They had their own reasons. 

Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky wrote that the bill would allow a future president to carry out a complete federal takeover of American elections. Sen Lisa Murkowski of Alaska called it unconstitutional and noted that 20% of her state’s population isn’t on the road system, meaning some of her constituents would need to buy a plane ticket just to register to vote. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the whole effort “goofy,” not because he opposes voter ID, but because every hour spent on a bill that can’t pass is an hour not spent on something that could actually help Republicans before November.

Those are the reasons the Senate won’t move, and when lawmakers refused to budge before leaving for a 17-day recess, frustration in the House boiled over. A group of conservatives led by Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna has now frozen the House floor entirely — no votes, no legislation. Nothing moves until the Senate comes back and passes a bill it has already rejected.

So this is where we are: The House is frozen, the Senate is on vacation, the housing bill is unsigned, inflation is rising, gas prices are up, and the members of Trump’s own party who dared to ask inconvenient questions have been systematically removed from Congress.

Now, let’s be honest about what this voting bill actually is. The premise is false; noncitizen voting essentially does not exist. Utah examined 2 million registered voters and found one confirmed noncitizen registration and zero instances of noncitizen voting. 

So this is where we are: The House is frozen, the Senate is on vacation, the housing bill is unsigned, inflation is rising and gas prices are up.

The architecture is suppression, built to make registration harder for people without passports or matching birth certificates, who are disproportionately Democrats. And the execution is incompetent, because the states with the lowest passport ownership in America are red states. You cannot write a bill restricting voting to people with passports and then pretend you didn’t just disenfranchise rural Republicans in Mississippi and West Virginia. McConnell and Murkowski will tell you it may not even survive a constitutional challenge.

This is not a stupid bill based on a false premise. It’s a cynical bill based on a false premise that turned out to also be a stupid bill. It is not about election integrity. It’s about Trump’s lack of integrity and his desperation.

If Republicans lose the House in November, Trump faces impeachment. The SAVE Act is his insurance policy. He is blocking a bill that helps Americans afford homes to force a bill that could disenfranchise his own voters, to protect himself from a Congress that is running out of patience with him.

Republicans are swimming for the lifeboat, and Trump keeps pulling it farther away. The president’s grip on this party has always rested on one calculation: that crossing him costs more than covering for him. But right now, that calculation is changing.

Allison Detzel contributed.

Ali Velshi

Ali Velshi is the host of “Velshi,” which airs Saturdays and Sundays on MSNBC. He has been awarded the National Headliner Award for Business & Consumer Reporting for “How the Wheels Came Off,” a special on the near collapse of the American auto industry. His work on disabled workers and Chicago’s red-light camera scandal in 2016 earned him two News and Documentary Emmy Award nominations, adding to a nomination in 2010 for his terrorism coverage.

Jimson Rodriguez

Jimson Rodriguez is a Segment Producer for “Velshi.”