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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that sees the cage-match construction at the White House and wonders how long it will be before President Donald Trump announces the America 250 pole-dancing contest on the Washington Monument.
This week, we’ve got a lot of Texas, where the filthy tricks and locker-room slurs have only just begun. Markwayne Mullin has a brilliantly dumb idea he’s workshopping. The DOJ is reportedly going after a woman who sought legal recourse against Trump years ago. So that’s cooool …
First: Trump’s sicko takedown of a senator who once looked at him funny.
1.
John Cornyn
A dirty deed.
The Texas senator, who only 18 months ago fell a handful of votes short of becoming Senate Republican leader, was officially put out to pasture in the Texas Senate runoff this week. Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general and personification of the shit-eating grin, defeated John Cornyn 64–36 after receiving Trump’s endorsement the previous week. A few weeks ago, no incumbent senator, period, had lost a primary since Alabama’s Luther Strange (who was kind of a fake senator anyway) in 2017. Now two—Cornyn and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy—have lost theirs.
Trump’s treatment of Cornyn was crueler than that of Cassidy. At least Trump had a reason to seek revenge against Cassidy, over his impeachment conviction vote in 2021. He didn’t have much reason to despise Cornyn, beyond a stray comment here or there. Cornyn had been a conservative soldier in the Senate: raising gobs of money from his Texas network; never once voting against Trump’s or leaders’ wishes. He wasn’t naturally MAGA, sure, and, as do most of the old-guard GOP senators, maybe thought Trump was completely and incurably insane. But he kept this to himself. Cornyn was caught in the crossfire of an ongoing feud between Trump and Senate leaders for the latter’s lack of interest in tossing aside the filibuster, firing the meddlesome parliamentarian, or giving the president his ballroom money. Senate Republicans were forgetting, in Trump’s view, that their role is to serve as his doormat. And so he reminded them.
2.
James Talarico
Republicans’ attack plan: Call him a girl.
Well! At least Texas Republicans now have a nominee and can pivot toward the necessary work of othering the Democratic nominee, James Talarico. They were hot out of the gate this week, playing the most cringeworthy—at least if you’re trying to win the political middle in Texas—hits of Talarico’s career, while also making up a few. Talarico did, for example, call God “nonbinary,” he did say that there are six biological sexes, he did say that “white skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus” of racism. But he is not a vegan, as Republicans all week have been claiming he is. He did, however, recently order potato-egg-and-cheese breakfast tacos—no meat, and no side order of calf blood for dippin’ either.
You’re going to hear a lot of nicknames for Talarico from the Republican side, with hundreds of millions of dollars put behind them in advertisements. Paxton, in his victory speech Tuesday night, called him “Six-Gender Jimmy,” “Low-T Talarico,” “Tofu Talarico,” and “James Tala-freako.” (From a pure nickname-construction standpoint, Six-Gender Jimmy flows best.) All the jabs run to the same delta, though, and it’s an old classic: They’re basically calling Talarico gay, or possibly even a literal girl. Read any post about him from a major account on X, and you may well see hundreds of comments from MAGA accounts saying, in some form or fashion, that Talarico is gay. (Talarico has a girlfriend.) White House aide Stephen Miller, meanwhile, is straightforwardly calling him “transgender.”
Talarico has responded that Paxton is “intentionally clipping my cringey comments to distract from his career of corruption.” There’s no doubt about that. Paxton is a scandal-o-matic blend of private deceit and public corruption. That’s rightly going to be the focal point of Talarico’s campaign. But this race is going to be the sort of toxic mud match in which the candidate who is most unfairly attacked will also likely lose. Talarico might as well throw some weird made-up insinuations at Paxton to keep up.
3.
E. Jean Carroll
Trump’s latest errand for the Justice Department.
According to a statement from the DOJ, which we have no reason to believe is ever telling the truth, the department “has not opened—and has never opened—a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll,” who sued Trump years ago for defamation and sexual abuse to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. But CNN reported this week that the DOJ has indeed launched a criminal investigation into Carroll and whether she committed perjury in a deposition by saying she had not taken outside funding for her lawsuit—when it was later revealed that tech billionaire (and major Democratic donor) Reid Hoffman had contributed to her case.
Whether the target would be Carroll, Hoffman, or anyone else adjacent to this case who lightened Trump’s wallet, it wouldn’t be good! It would once again be a case of federal prosecutors shaking down people who have been mean to their client, the president. Same old, same old. Unfortunately!
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4.
Maureen Galindo
A sleaze operation repelled.
Democrats have engaged in plenty of mischief to prop up bad Republican candidates in recent election cycles, so they can’t really complain. But hot dog! Republicans are running some sleazy operations in the field this year. A mysterious PAC called Lead Left, which covers its tracks relatively well but still reveals GOP ties in its metadata, has been spending money to boost lousy or extremist Democratic candidates in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Texas. The lousy, extremist Democratic candidate who has garnered the most national attention is Maureen Galindo, a sex therapist running against the party’s preferred candidate, Johnny Garcia, in Texas’ red-leaning but flippable 35th District. Galindo had very little money of her own, but Lead Left spent nearly $1 million to boost her.
Galindo’s campaign blew up after she posted on Instagram earlier this month that she would turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center into “a prison for American Zionists,” adding, “It will also be a castration processing center for pedophiles which will probably be most of the Zionists.” This led to a wave of shocked, shocked Republicans calling on Democrats to condemn Galindo; Democrats did so and encouraged Republicans to stop paying for her campaign. Anyhoo, Galindo lost her runoff this week 64–36. Lead Left, which registered its address to a Staples in Florida, will simply have to lick its wounds, get up, and fight harder for the idyllic progressive future it dreams of.
5.
Markwayne Mullin
An impressively bad new idea.
The new Homeland Security secretary, irritated about protests outside ICE facilities in blue states, has a fresh idea: cutting or stopping the processing of international travelers in “sanctuary” jurisdictions, i.e., localities that restrict cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Markwayne Mullin said this week that although no decision has yet been made, he is “drawing up plans” to this effect. “These sanctuary cities where the local radical-left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our jobs and enforce federal laws,” he said on Fox News, means “we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities either.”
Say the Trump administration canceled international flights into Chicago, New York, Newark, Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco—for starters. That would not mean that the international routes would all start going through Dallas and Oklahoma City. It would just mean that most international travel into the United States would be canceled, which would—what’s the right phrase here?—fuck up everything everywhere. The public, rather than blaming Democratic cities for their immigration policies, would probably blame the administration that chose to cancel all the flights for all of the flights being canceled.
Mullin may be out on a limb with this, with CNN reporting that the “push is seen internally as more of a personal desire of Mullin’s than one coming from inside the West Wing.” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directly rebutted the idea in a congressional hearing last week, saying, “We shouldn’t shut down air travel in a state that doesn’t agree with our politics.” So while the idea seems unlikely to be implemented, you never know what self-destructive change of heart Trump could have.
6.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz
A delicate district selection.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ latest gerrymander of his state cracked the district of longtime Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the empress of Broward County, five different ways. That left her shopping for a new district. She had to choose between a safe Democratic district and a Republican-leaning one that would nevertheless be winnable in a good environment. She chose the safe one, even though she doesn’t presently reside in it.
Her decision is making for some uncomfortable home-state politics. The district she selected, Florida’s new 20th, is a plurality-Black and majority-minority district. Plurality- and majority-Black districts are rapidly becoming fewer and farther between since the Supreme Court eliminated protections for them in Louisiana v. Callais, and Wasserman Schultz is getting an earful from Black Democratic leaders in the state. Members of Florida’s Democratic National Committee—an organization that Wasserman Schultz, memorably, used to chair—wrote this week, “Our party cannot credibly denounce the dismantling of Black political power by Republicans while treating one of Florida’s few remaining majority-Black districts as a political opportunity for an incumbent seeking a safer seat.” Wasserman Schultz’s argument is that she has the ability to do the most for the district as the No. 2 Democrat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. Expect more of these awkward collisions as the effects of Callais play out across the country.
7.
Jake Auchincloss
Did he miss the news that Janet Mills dropped out, or what?
Pockets within the Democratic Party apparatus remain hesitant to endorse Graham Platner in Maine in his Senate bid against incumbent Susan Collins. Even knowing that, though, the comments of Democratic Rep. Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts this week were unusually black-and-white. In a CNN interview, Auchincloss said that he finds “that tattoo and his commentary about it to be personally disqualifying.” He added, “I hope Maine voters agree with me,” because “it would be a mistake for the Democratic Party to think that Graham Platner’s brand of the Democratic Party is what wins us durable majorities throughout this country.”
So if Platner is the presumptive Democratic nominee in the state … and Auchincloss thinks Platner’s (since-removed) Totenkopf tattoo is “personally disqualifying” … and that he hopes “Maine voters agree with him” … is Auchincloss saying he hopes Collins beats Platner? No, dingus! How dare you reach a conclusion based on his words! “Susan Collins is a rubber stamp for the worst admin in history,” Auchincloss said in a cleanup post. “Claims that I would endorse her, implicitly or otherwise, ignore my track record supporting Democrats to take back both chambers.” He added, “If it were me I’d vote for someone else in the Maine Democratic primary.” But there’s only token opposition in the Democratic primary, not serious competition to Platner. We’re frankly confused how Auchincloss cornered himself into this one. Did he just have a brain fart and forget that Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the primary?
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