2 weeks ago
1
Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a counseling newsletter about how to move on after breaking up with your best friend.
We had a bunch of policy disputes between senators in mind for this week’s list, but then the big fun thing happened and this edition became more of a detailed recap of a pro wrestling feud. Beyond that, we take a look at the 2026 Senate map and track some ex–Biden staff infighting for old times’ sake. All of that, plus the weather, coming up next.
Anyway: The main event!
1.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump
If even these two can’t make it …
This week, nuclear fission was achieved in Washington as Donald Trump and Elon Musk finally broke up in one big, beautiful cloud of destruction. Just a week after leaving the government, Musk called on the GOP to “KILL” the “disgusting abomination” of the megabill Congress is working on. After Trump—gently, to be honest—said he was “very disappointed” in Musk, and suggested Musk was mad because the bill would put an abrupt end to electric vehicle tax credits, Musk really began to unload. “Without me,” he posted, “Trump would have lost the election, Dems would control the House and Republicans would be 51-49 in the Senate.” He added: “Such ingratitude.” Things continued to escalate as Trump suggested he’d eliminate Musk’s “Government Subsidies and Contracts.” Then Musk claimed that Trump was in “the Epstein files,” which is “the real reason they have not been made public.” Musk also suggested creating a new political party, replied “yes” to a tweet saying Trump should be impeached and replaced with Vice President J.D. Vance, and predicted that Trump’s tariffs would cause a recession later this year. Steve Bannon, an OG MAGA figure who’s long resented the recent entry of the techies into the tent, suggested that Trump should deport Musk.
What do we make of this? Primarily that it’s all delightful. But how about a fresh entry …
2.
Elon Musk
Shoo!
Here we’ve got two world-historical narcissists who’ve already done so much work, together and separately, to destroy basic functions of the federal government, the American information ecosystem, and international alliances, enriching themselves with crypto schemes and through pressure to foreign countries along the way. So if we had to pick one getting the best of the other?
We want to see Trump embarrass this guy, of course. Git ’im Donny!! Don’t let the world’s ultimate oligarch, who has purchased a major communications platform to disseminate his personal propaganda, bully an elected official. Musk, in any of his involvements in public affairs, has never understood public sentiment or why there’s a system of government that prevents him, an unelected private citizen, from eliminating agencies that he has read conspiracy theories about. He has an even more vacant understanding of the legislative process than Trump and, unlike Trump, thinks the OBBBA would be more popular if the spending cuts went deeper. Musk has the gall to threaten to take out politicians for “the next 40+ years” if they don’t do as he says. Worst of all, he’s not funny. And he’s had way too much power for any one unfunny person to have. OK, one more …
3.
Donald Trump
Pull yourself together, man.
Alas, Trump has been reserved throughout this process, refusing to go blow-for-blow, saying he’s “disappointed” in Elon and otherwise trying to change the subject. Sure, he tossed out a threat to cancel Musk’s federal contracts. But you could tell his heart wasn’t really in it. Where’s the fire? Guy over here says that Trump would’ve lost if not for him and suggests he’s a kiddie diddler, and all we get is a Maybe I’ll cancel the contracts, I dunno? Huh? Is there not an Adderall laying around the floor of Elon’s old office to give to Our President?
A couple of factors appear to be at play. First, Trump’s staff seems to have gotten to him and convinced him that further escalation isn’t in his interest as he’s trying to move this bill through the Senate. Never good advice—you’ve gotta let the big dog eat. Second, Trump is reportedly despondent after the split. “People close to Trump have described him as more sad than angry at Musk,” ABC News reported Friday morning. “One adviser who was with Trump on Thursday night said he seemed ‘bummed’ about the breakup.” Ah, yeah. We’ve all been there. But you’ve got to pick yourself up. A good friend—Stephen Miller, Steve Witkoff, Liddle Marco Rubio—needs to let him know that there’s plenty of fish in the sea, and he’s still a catch.
4.
Senate Democrats
What’s the path to a Senate majority in 2026?
The answer to the question posed in the subhead of this entry is most likely: There isn’t one. But a couple of developments this week got us theorizing. Here’s the map, if you’d like to follow along. To retake the majority, Democrats would need a four-seat net pickup. Senate Democrats would need to retain all of their current seats, including those decided by competitive races in Georgia, Michigan, and New Hampshire. They would need to flip Thom Tillis’ seat in North Carolina and Susan Collins’ seat in Maine. Neither of these is easy by any stretch—and ousting Collins, even though she’s in a much bluer state, is the harder of these two tasks.
What would be the next two flips? Well, we’ve been watching closely as Joni Ernst spent a couple of days last week making fun of her constituents for being worried that GOP policy changes might result in more deaths. It calls into question her baseline political skills. Democrats have already lined up a gruff white-guy mechanic with tattoos to play the part of spoiler there, which is an improvement from the party’s prosecutor/CIA analyst archetype of cycles past. The next opportunity would be Texas, where normal GOP Sen. John Cornyn, according to early polling, is at serious risk of losing his primary to a notorious ding-dong, state Attorney General Ken Paxton. Were Paxton to be nominated, it might give Democrats a sliver of hope that the state could be competitive. Overall, we’d still say the odds are higher that Republicans lose net zero Senate seats this cycle than that they lose even one. But we can at least see the outlines of a path under perfect conditions.
5.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
They had plenty of time to read the bill.
The Georgia congresswoman made an interesting admission this week. She posted, in “full transparency,” that she didn’t know about the OBBBA’s 10-year ban on state and local regulation of artificial intelligence when she voted for the bill, and had she known, she would have voted against it. This leaves us torn between wanting to make jokes about her for not knowing this was in the bill or commending her for owning up to it and appropriately criticizing it. (Ban all A.I., by the way.) She wasn’t the first to come clean like this. Nebraska Rep. Michael Flood admitted at a town hall that he was unaware of a provision gutting judges’ ability to hold administration officials in contempt for disobeying court orders when he voted for the bill.
We think Greene, especially, is using this as a means of getting some leverage in the final negotiations between House and Senate. Which is fine, people do that. But these admissions give some legs to a line of complaint we find tedious: Big bills are too big, and voted on so quickly that members don’t have time to read them! Please. The A.I. regulation ban had been kicked around for a while and was in the original draft of the bill. Members should have staff who can brief them about important provisions in bills of any page length—and there was plenty of reporting around this particular provision, too. When a last-minute amendment with a handful of changes comes out, a staffer should be able to digest what’s important about it in five minutes and brief their bosses. Complaints about page length are for sissies, but if you need more time, withhold your vote.
6.
David Richardson
Is “hurricane” the one with all the water, or is that a fire thing?
We confess that we just had to google this guy’s name after he’d been sitting in our notes all week as “FEMA idiot.” Richardson, the acting FEMA administrator, is a Marine who served overseas until he retired to paint and write; then he gave up on that to have very important jobs in the Trump administration. After beginning the administration in the Department of Homeland Security at the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD, pronounced “KWAMMED!” in our head), he moved over to the Federal Emergency Management Agency in May after the last guy couldn’t stand it. In his first all-hands meeting at FEMA, Richardson famously told employees “Don’t get in my way” because “I will run right over you,” adding that he doesn’t “stop at yield signs,” and that “I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA.” We’d bet it all that he talks to his waiter at Chili’s like this, too.
This week, Richardson returned to the news after telling staff during a briefing, in Reuters’ words, that “he had not been aware the country has a hurricane season.” A DHS spokesperson described the leak as a “meanspirited” spin on a “joke.” But speaking of hurricane season, it started June 1, and because of the Trump administration’s various cuts across government, at both FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, it’s looking like a fair amount of guesswork may be involved this year in destruction predictions.
7.
Karine Jean-Pierre
Those knives came out quickly.
To the Surge’s eye, President Joe Biden’s former press secretary was someone who had an incredibly difficult job—arguing that the visibly declining president was actually in perfect shape 100 percent of the time—and was also really bad at it. That seems to have been the internal opinion at the Biden White House, too, because when her book deal was announced this week, her former colleagues let loose. A key thing about the book is that its premise is ridiculous. In the promotion for her book, she announces that she—the most recent spokesperson for a Democratic president—is an independent, and her book “takes us through the three weeks that led to Biden’s abandoning his bid for a second term and the betrayal by the Democratic Party that led to his decision.” This is a clear case of the book-deal interest coming first and the gimmick second.
The announcement served as a catalyzing event for ex–Biden staffers’ years of frustration with Jean-Pierre. “The amount of time that was spent coddling [Jean-Pierre] and appeasing her was astronomical compared to our attention on actual matters of substance,” one ex-official told Axios. Another told Politico that “everyone thinks this is a grift,” while a former assistant press secretary tweeted “lol.” This is the way things should work. You are free to do a cash grab after being bad at your White House job, but you will have to endure everyone making fun of you for it.
English (US) ·