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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter whose authors will be responding to any and all social invitations this weekend with: “My love for the United States of America does not allow me to do so.” (More on that in a bit.)
But first: What a week of self-destruction in American politics, as officials from each party scramble to undermine themselves in the midterms. With Donald Trump leading the way, Republicans are engaged in a lemminglike rush over an electoral cliff. Democrats, meanwhile, have turned a report on why they lost the previous election into a squabble that could make it harder to win the next ones. It’s a real “resistible force vs. highly mobile object” situation we have here.
Before we get into it, you may have noticed a distinct lack of Jim Newell in this week’s edition, but fear not: He’ll be back next week, so please be sure to send any compliments to us and complaints to him. Onward.
1.
Donald Trump
Republicans may be tired of (him) winning.
There was a lot of talk this week of Donald Trump’s command over the Republican Party, and for good reason. He has made it clear that his endorsement can make or break GOP candidates. Two incumbents—Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky—saw their political careers launched directly into the sun recently after the president backed their primary challengers. (Cassidy voted to remove Trump from office over Jan. 6, and Massie pushed a bit too hard for the administration to release information about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the powerful—and gross—men who maintained ties with him.)
But Trump’s dominance in Republican primaries sometimes means that Republicans struggle to dominate anywhere else, as the president has a history of siding with candidates who fall hard on their faces when they have to win over voters who aren’t already MAGA faithful. In 2022 Trump arguably cost the party control of the Senate, backing terrible candidates for winnable races. (You may remember flops like Pennsylvania’s (Dr.) Mehmet Oz, whose campaign suffered from its deep ties to New Jersey. Or Blake Masters’ charisma-free run in Arizona. Or the incomparable Herschel Walker, who mixed the despicable—allegations of domestic violence—with the nonsensical: Who could forget his campaign-trail meditation on the relative merits of vampires vs. werewolves?) We’ll never know if better candidates could have won those races, but the ones Trump elevated in GOP primaries certainly didn’t.
Nevertheless, he’s persisting: Trump this week tossed a coveted endorsement to Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general, whose list of personal and public scandals could be its own entire edition of the Surge. Trump’s thumb on the scale is bad news for incumbent Sen. John Cornyn, who’s facing Paxton in a runoff primary election that wraps up Tuesday. But it’s good news for Democrats: Cornyn was widely seen as a far stronger general election candidate in the coming race with Democrat James Talarico. Now, it’s Texas, so an orange traffic cone in a MAGA hat would still be the favorite to win, but GOP lawmakers are openly bemoaning the president’s intervention, claiming that Paxton (who may be sub–traffic cone in terms of his appeal to moderates) hands Democrats a chance.
Also making life more difficult for Republicans in the midterms: Trump’s cratering popularity. A recent New York Times/Siena poll found that only 37 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance. It turns out it’s bad politics for a candidate who ran against “no more wars in the Middle East” to start a new war in the Middle East—especially one tailor-made to drive up gas prices.
2.
Senate Republicans
The primarying will continue until morale improves.
All this may be why Republicans don’t seem thrilled about Trump’s tightening grip. This week, the GOP-controlled Senate skipped town early in part to dodge a vote on a bill Trump wants to fund his White House ballroom. Perhaps not coincidentally, the balkiest Senate Republicans are also ones Trump has clashed with. Cassidy and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the latter of whom is retiring after a dustup with Trump, both oppose the funding. So do Susan Collins of Maine, who faces a tough reelection fight this fall, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, another sometime Trump antagonist.
Of course, finding your spine only after voters put you out to pasture—or out of fear that they will—isn’t exactly a profile in courage. Republicans also have a decadelong history of caving to Trump if he leans on them hard enough, so we’ll see what happens when the Senate comes back from its Memorial Day recess next month.
3.
The Democratic Party
Leave no stone unturned, no banana peel un–slipped upon.
Lest you think Democrats would capitalize on all this GOP infighting, the party instead managed to step on a rake of its own making this week. On Thursday, the Democratic National Committee released a 192-page report about how Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election and what the party should do differently next time. Or at least that’s what it was supposed to be about. Instead, the so-called autopsy was a shambolic train wreck of missing paragraphs, factual errors, and apparent plagiarism. It mentions neither Joe Biden’s age nor the words Israel or Gaza.
Why wait months to release a report that looks as if it were whipped up by a high school freshman an hour before deadline? A vocal faction of Democrats—including the former Obama staffers who host Pod Save America—has been braying for the autopsy’s release as a sign of transparency. Some of those same voices now want Ken Martin, the DNC chairman who commissioned the report, to resign over how bad it was. Let the infighting continue!
4.
Jared Polis
Pardon me?
The DNC is based in D.C., but never fear: Dems as far away as Colorado are in disarray as well. Last week, the state’s governor, Jared Polis, freed Tina Peters, a 2020 election denier and former county clerk who was partially through a nine-year prison sentence. Trump had for months pressured Polis to release her, including by denying Colorado federal funding. But the governor cast the commutation as a defense of free speech, claiming that Peters had been punished “for having strange beliefs.” In fact, a jury convicted her of conspiring to access election software in a bid to prove that the vote was rigged.
Polis’ commutation earned bipartisan backlash, including from the Republican county district attorney who prosecuted Peters. On Thursday, the Colorado Democratic Party voted overwhelmingly to censure the governor. As our colleague Shirin Ali wrote in Executive Dysfunction, Slate’s newsletter about legal issues, “Polis has singlehandedly set a dangerous precedent for other states attempting to stave off a president unafraid to bully his perceived opponents into oblivion.” (You can sign up here for Shirin’s newsletter.)
5.
The Slush Fund
Even for Trump, this is extreme.
Last week, the Surge explained the sordid tale of Trump suing the IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns, noting that the door was open to some sort of ridiculous settlement in which the president’s Department of Justice lackeys would shovel money to Trump and his allies. And wow did they waltz right through that open door.
This week, Trump (the administration) settled with Trump (the person), with the latter getting an apology and the former agreeing not to audit any of Trump’s past returns. Somehow more egregiously, the government is setting up a $1.776 billion fund (get it? Like the year 1776!) for “victims of lawfare and weaponization”—the administration’s term for people investigated or prosecuted for, you know, breaking a lot of laws during Trump’s first term and during Joe Biden’s. So who gets the cash? Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gets to establish a five-member commission to decide who gets to feed from the trough. We don’t yet know to whom exactly the money will flow, but we do know when the flow will stop: The fund expires in December 2028, about a month before Trump’s term ends.
6.
Iran
Trump wanted WHO?
The president’s domestic misadventures have a way of pushing his foreign policy blunders out of the spotlight, but this week brought fresh evidence of how little he thought things through before he started dropping bombs on Iran. On Tuesday, the New York Times reported that Israel and the U.S. conspired early in the war to replace the Islamic republic’s theocratic leaders with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. You might remember Ahmadinejad, Iran’s hard-line former president, for the anti-American harangues he delivered at the U.N. while not wearing a tie. As the Times drily put it, “To say that Mr. Ahmadinejad was an unusual choice would be a vast understatement.” Alas, like so many of Trump’s efforts to force Iran to capitulate, the plan fell apart.
We also got more hints about where Trump’s jingoistic eye may land next. On Wednesday, the U.S. indicted Cuba’s Raúl Castro, the 94-year-old brother of the late revolutionary leader Fidel, on charges of ordering civilian aircraft shot down near the island nation in 1996. Trump also told reporters that “it looks like I’ll be the one that does it,” referring to U.S. military intervention there. Buckle up.
7.
Don Jr.
A disappointing RSVP.
Donald Trump Jr. is getting married this weekend to socialite Bettina Anderson. The groom’s father will not be among those in attendance. On Friday, the president confirmed that he wouldn’t make it, after teasing Thursday that he just had a bit too much going on. On the one hand, it’s a busy time, what with Trump having started a war and the economy looking more than a little iffy, and it’s understandable to want to be locked in on running the world’s most powerful country. On the other hand, as presidents go, Trump hasn’t been exactly shy about hitting the links or engaging in any number of other leisurely pursuits. And so it’s a bit suspicious that he can’t make his eldest progeny’s wedding. His “Father of the Year” award, like his Nobel Prize, will have to wait.
