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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which was off last Saturday so will now catch you up on the previous week’s news: Natalie Harp. There, you’re caught up.
August “silly season” continues with the usual slapstick stories about … international trade wars and a possible Russian attack against NATO. (Just ask ChatGPT about it, Darline Graham.) Elsewhere, Republicans have come to terms with the politics around data centers, and Hakeem Jeffries held a revealing meeting.
But first, This Week in Donald Trump Making Life Awful for Senate Republicans.
1.
Donald Trump
This week in bold ideas: a trade war with Canada two months from Election Day.
Talks with Canada on a trade agreement have broken down, which means the trade war is back on. Trump has announced new tariffs on billions of dollars of Canadian goods, and Canada has responded in kind. The breakdown features the usual Trumpian accoutrements: a personal spat with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whom Trump has compared unfavorably to the Canadian politician’s late brother, and whose trash talk has prompted Trump to pretend to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Each day we live through this era, we get vastly dumber.
As dumb as it all is, the consequences are quite real economically—and politically, for Trump’s own (theoretical) team. It’s not just that this latest trade war will raise costs at a time when “high costs” are the biggest political issue in the country. It’s going to raise costs particularly in states that are either bordering or in close proximity to Canada and rely on trade with it. States like, we don’t know, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Alaska. Anything going on in those states in November? Any Senate races, by chance?
In Maine and Michigan especially, this has to be mortifying to Republicans. Republican candidates Susan Collins and Mike Rogers have better-than-expected opportunities to win, given the tumult Democrats went through in selecting their nominees. Now Trump has gone out of his way to make their lives much more challenging. Sometimes (regularly), we’re genuinely unsure whom the president wants to win this fall.
2.
Greg Abbott
The great data-center pivot.
Last November, the Texas governor had proudly declared his state the “epicenter of AI development” when he announced a $40 billion investment with Google. Since then, data centers have sprung up across Texas. But in the past couple of weeks—and with his bid for a fourth term pending—Abbott has changed his tune. He’s called for a pause on new data-center development while the state conducts a “comprehensive audit” of their energy and water use. Whether or not this announcement has teeth for data-center development in Texas, it signals to irate voters in the state, including many rural Republicans, that he hears their concerns. In an ABC News interview, he explained his change of heart and why A.I. companies “dug their own grave” and “got the backlash they deserve.”
This is a key moment in the midterms. In just the past few weeks, Republicans—with the exception of a helpful-as-always Donald Trump—have suddenly grasped that if they’re for unrestricted data-center expansion while Democrats are against it, they’re going to get walloped in local, state, and federal races. The strategy from here on out for GOP incumbents is to show what they’ve done to rein in data centers and outflank Democrats that way. The question for Democrats is whether they can argue that governors like Abbott are just saying what they have to say to get through November, after which business will continue as usual.
3.
Darline Graham
Time to find out if the Senate is her thing.
It’s not that we regret having last week off. But which god did we anger to have our off week align with Darline Graham saying, in a South Carolina Senate debate, that she was “not that informed on national security” and that “national security is not my thing”? SHEESH. It was a simple question about U.S. policy toward Taiwan—how hard could it be? (OK, fair.) Although Graham had the endorsement of Trump and most of the state establishment, it was bad enough of an answer that it got us wondering whether she could actually blow this race. Little is known about Graham—or, apparently, by Graham—and it’s not as if the state’s right wing was ever adoring of her late brother.
Graham did pull it off this week—barely. In Tuesday’s primary runoff, she defeated conservative Rep. Ralph Norman by a mere 5 percentage points. For some of the talk about the waning power of Trump’s endorsements, we think getting a candidate elected who told voters the previous week that she didn’t know anything is among the president’s more notable recent political feats. Graham will face Democrat Annie Andrews, a pediatrician, in November’s general election. It might be too much to expect Andrews to have a shot in a state as red as South Carolina. But the national GOP may have to spend more than the zero dollars it should have to to win a South Carolina Senate race.
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4.
John Ratcliffe
An unnerving visit to Moscow.
The CIA director visited Moscow this week to “deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries,” the Wall Street Journal first reported. For those who haven’t been following these developments, this could come across as burying the lede: The reason the CIA director would visit Moscow to warn Russia not to attack a NATO country is because the intelligence suggests that Russia might attack a NATO country—whichever Baltic state suits its fancy, according to the most recent intelligence estimates.
It’s not as if Vladimir Putin woke up a couple of weeks ago and came up with this hot idea for the first time. He has been testing the alliance’s resolve for some time. In an incident last year, for example, NATO fighter jets shot down Russian drones that had entered Polish airspace—something that Trump, who is skeptical at best of NATO, brushed off at the time. Since then, there’s been one major geopolitical development that would entice Putin to push the envelope further: The United States entered into a pointless arsenal-sink known as the “Iran war,” in which it cashed a significant chunk of American weaponry in exchange for … well, something, maybe. Hopefully, Ratcliffe didn’t merely ask them to please not invade a NATO country—this is a situation where a pretty please is necessary.
5.
Hakeem Jeffries
A revealing meeting.
The New York Times reported this week that the House Democratic leader recently took a meeting with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law who doesn’t have an official government job but remains very much in the mix. News of the meeting prompted some angst on the left that Jeffries was looking toward more of a collaborative relationship with the administration should he become speaker, rather than an antagonistic one. That prompted Jeffries to post a video in which he clarified that if he’s speaker, “no one is going to get a pass—we’re going to hold every single member of the Trump cartel accountable beginning on Day 1.”
This is not a newsletter that gets mad about people having a meeting. The news here is what the administration is conceding by requesting this meeting. Per the Times, “The pair discussed housing, immigration and the high cost of living as potential areas of common ground,” and “Mr. Kushner suggested that Mr. Jeffries should meet with the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.” In other words, this meeting was an unusually candid acknowledgment from a member of the Trump inner circle that House Republicans’ grasp on power is winding down, and a sign that the planning for the next two years has begun.
6.
Mike Collins
A growing staffer problem.
The Georgia GOP Senate candidate is in quite a hole. Polls show him badly trailing in his race against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who has gone from an under-the-radar freshman senator to a potential President McDreamBoat in Democrats’ eyes over the past couple of months. If national Republicans hadn’t already fully written off Collins’ bid, they might now. As the Washington Post reported this week, a former staffer, Preston Parra, had posted an image of himself in Ku Klux Klan garb to X, along with a separate post that shaped the word twink into a swastika.
This is hardly the first staffing problem for Collins. Collins, who is himself a Twitter troll, unloaded his previous chief of staff after Slate reported on his involvement in a group chat with prominent white nationalists. A week before that Slate report, he had fired his chief strategist for a litany of troubles. And just before that, another former Collins staffer—William Paul, son of Sen. Rand Paul—launched into a drunken antisemitic rant after he encountered New York Rep. Mike Lawler (not Jewish) at a D.C. bar. Now, think to yourself: If you’re a big-money national Republican super PAC, is this the sort of team that you’re willing to throw tens of millions of dollars behind to dig the candidate out of an 8-point polling deficit? It answers itself.
7.
Randy George
A typically ludicrous partial explanation for an Army officer’s mysterious firing.
In early April, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth fired Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, with little public explanation and to the disappointment of many in the military who really liked the guy. This week, the Post reported that shortly before he was fired, George had been warned to stop investigating an Army helicopter flyby outside Kid Rock’s house in Tennessee. (Here is a clip of that stupid moment.)
The person warning George was his deputy, Gen. Chris LaNeve, whom the administration plans to submit to the Senate for confirmation but hasn’t yet, most likely because he doesn’t have the support. (George, you see, is from Iowa, home state of Sen. Joni Ernst, of the Armed Services Committee, who is retiring and thus liberated to act on her grudges.) The vague, alleged explanation at the time of George’s firing was that Hegseth wanted someone “who will implement President Trump and Hegseth’s vision for the Army.” In other words, a yes-man—especially when told not to investigate helicopter stunts at Kid Rock’s house.
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