Trump Has the Opportunity to Do the Funniest Thing

Politics Republicans are counting on the president to be generous and think about someone other than himself. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Ron Jenkins/Stringer/Getty Images Plus and Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images. Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers the most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s politics newsletter that has no time for a joke right here because we have important business to discuss. Starting next week, the Surge is going to look different: sleeker and fresher but still phenomenally trenchant. Alongside a refreshed design, the Surge will break down the news of the week into three categories: What you need to pay attention to now, what you need to keep an eye on, and which story is a bunch of nonsense you should ignore. Also, starting in October, the Surge will be available exclusively to Slate Plus subscribers. If you would like to subscribe to Slate Plus and the many riches it offers, use promo code SURGE25 at checkout for a 25 percent discount on a full-year subscription. We appreciate you, Surge Nation. Anyway, enough with the business talk. Let’s chat about something fun, like American politics, and its most important feature: money. 1. MAGA Inc. There’s no way someone like Trump would simply keep the money for himself, is there? MAGA Inc. is the president’s super PAC. As of July 31, it had $403 million on hand. The Trump associates who run it have kept telling and telling and telling House and Senate members that the balance will be spent on their races this fall, a cash bomb to help save GOP majorities in Congress. But it is now September of an election year, and the super PAC has thrown only a few bucks here and there. Where’s the cash? The Atlantic reported last week that Donald Trump was planning to spend soon, but with a twist: He had ordered “a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.” In other words, he called for ads celebrating himself. As you can guess, given Trump’s yawning unpopularity, this idea is going over poorly with the traditional GOP consultant class. Beyond that, will MAGA Inc. unload in individual races, mentioning—or attacking—individual candidates? Given that it is, again, September, Republicans are starting to doubt they’ll see much of this money. As the Washington Post reported, GOP leaders have begun to “conclude that it’s too late to fully deploy the cash in the midterms and that he intends to hold on to much of it for his own purposes.” This, dear reader. This is … it’s perfect, isn’t it? 2. Ken Paxton Texas Senate candidate hardest hit. The single candidate most in need of MAGA Inc.’s largesse is Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton. Given all of his scandals, baggage, and poor personal fundraising abilities, Paxton could use a heavy infusion of cash to defeat Democratic candidate James Talarico in a large, expensive state with umpteen media markets. But ever since Trump endorsed Paxton over Sen. John Cornyn (who had a much easier, and cheaper, path to victory) in the primary, Senate Republicans and big Texas donors have been of the mind that it’s Trump’s responsibility—not theirs—to fund his campaign. And so we have a bit of a standoff here. A Texas-size standoff. (Sorry, couldn’t resist. Last week of Surge 1.0!) The campaign to push MAGA Inc. to get involved there showed signs of urgency this week. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said on Fox News that “we’re going to need the president and his team” to get involved. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy said he was “hoping that the president’s going to spend $100 or $200 million in Texas.” And the dean of Texas strategists, Karl Rove, warned that if Trump doesn’t get involved soon, “Talarico is going to run the message of ‘My opponent is the most corrupt politician in Texas history’ all the way to the victory lane.” All well and good. But have any of these complainers considered some of the nice golden trims Trump could use for his presidential library if he keeps this money? Let’s get priorities straight here. 3. Donald Trump There may not be super PAC money in Texas, but at least there will be a party. Here’s when we’ll know that artificial intelligence has achieved superintelligence: when we tell ChatGPT “Come up with a political event that the Surge could not possibly look forward to less” and it responds “The Republican midterm convention in Dallas.” (So far, the cowardly robot refuses to “invent one.”) Alas, the convention is happening next week for two days, and our dim view of the whole shebang appears to be widely shared within the GOP. Politico surveyed 70 GOP candidates and members and found that most of them weren’t going because they had convenient scheduling conflicts. As for the programming, the GOP intends to highlight its work on tax cuts and border security, as well as its support for things like stock trading bans for members of Congress. (There is no apparent programming for anti-corruption measures within the West Wing.) Now, there is a world where this could be productive for Republicans if they stuck to the script. But Trump, who was at first scheduled to speak only the second night, has now decided that he will speak both nights, ensuring that his showmanship will dominate all coverage. The good news for the GOP, at least, is that Trump’s speeches on both nights will be drowned out by the first two NFL games of the season. 4. Ed Markey We demand a new generation of leadership! (Wait, scratch that.) Some of the old people are still OK! In the Massachusetts Senate primary on Tuesday, 80-year-old Sen. Ed Markey, who was first sent to Washington the year Jimmy Carter won the presidency, handily defeated a primary challenge from Rep. Seth Moulton. Our colleague Ian Prasad Philbrick wrote an excellent breakdown of the result this week. In a state like Massachusetts, where the Democratic campaign strategy is simple—run your ass to the left and never look back—Markey had the progressive bona fides to survive Democratic primary voters’ War on Old Incumbents. Moulton, meanwhile, had coded himself as unforgivably centrist, if not viciously right-wing, by saying, after the 2024 election, that he didn’t believe that trans women should play in women’s sports. This marks the second consecutive time Old Man Markey has fended off a former rising star in the party, having tanked Joe Kennedy III’s challenge in 2020. We would find it unusual if Markey ran again in 2032. If he does, though, good luck to whichever next-big-thing in Massachusetts politics chooses to end their career by primarying him. 5. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez Straight to the principal’s office! Two House Democrats—Washington Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Maine Rep. Jared Golden—broke ranks with their party this week on a procedural vote teeing up votes on several bills, allowing the procedural vote to pass. The reason they did so was to ensure they got a vote on a bill that would help lobstermen. But their procedural votes also set up a vote on a messaging bill from Republicans that both condemned socialism “in all its forms” (lol) and called for the enactment of the SAVE America Act, Trump and Republicans’ hard-line elections bill. It’s a typical election-year poison-pill resolution that Republicans can use to run campaign ads saying Democrats voted to support socialism. Democratic members in competitive races did not want to vote on it but then had to, thanks to their friends from Washington and Maine. House Democrats were furious, and sass was thrown around freely. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said he didn’t get a heads-up from the members, telling reporters, “You’ll have to talk to Katherine”—as in Rep. Katherine Clark, the whip. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, against whom Jeffries will always be measured, said that when she was in charge, “we didn’t even consider that anybody would do that.” Rep. Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, turned his back to Gluesenkamp Perez while she testified in the committee the following day. Members are so angry that the party is considering punishments for the members—Golden will be leaving Congress in a hot minute and got his lobster bill passed, so he couldn’t care less—and new caucus rules to ensure that such things don’t happen again. That might be a little heavy-handed when a simple talking-to, or a vote-whipping operation that’s more on top of things, could suffice. 6. Dan Driscoll Are Hegseth’s purges finally bothering Trump? Last week, we wrote about Pete Hegseth’s firing of Gen. Randy George, the Army chief of staff, over a repeated series of clashes, including the question of whether a military helicopter fly-by at Kid Rock’s house was worthy of investigation. This week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll submitted his resignation, a move that “had been seen as increasingly imminent after months of friction with Hegseth and others aligned with the Pentagon chief,” per the Post. What’s interesting about this one is that Driscoll has friends in places above Hegseth’s pay grade. He’s friends with Vice President J.D. Vance, with whom he attended Yale Law School. And when Driscoll personally brought his concerns about Hegseth’s leadership to Trump last week, Trump both encouraged Driscoll to stay on and reportedly “expressed concern about the deep cuts to the Army’s senior leadership.” Could this be the beginning of Hegseth losing favor with Trump? We’re going to say … no, Trump probably forgot about it in five minutes, when he resumed thinking about marble samples for the ballroom. 7. Ted Cruz We doing this again? Good news: These stupid midterms will be over soon, and then we can turn to the stupid presidential race for our yuks. On the GOP side, don’t expect it to simply be a race between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vance. Among others, Sen. Ted Cruz, who has waited three long cycles to give it another go after placing second to Trump in 2016, is making moves. As the Wall Street Journal reported from Iowa this week, Cruz has been “quietly asking people if they would be interested in working on his 2028 bid.” For some time now, too, he’s been pushing back on elements of MAGA, such as the growing antisemitism in the Tucker Carlson wing of the far right and overreaches by the Federal Communications Commission. In other words, he’s trying to carve a lane for himself as the representative of pre-Trump conservatism. Such a strategy depends on there being a backlash within the GOP to Trump-style populism, as well as general sloppiness as his presidency wanes. All we can say is, uh, good luck, we guess? The main reason we’re posting this is because Vance was asked about a Cruz 2028 run on Thursday and had, essentially, the same response as us: “And on Ted Cruz, I mean, look, man, he’s just clearly—Ted is a very authentic and likable guy, and I’m sure he’ll do great.” A deluge of cattiness awaits us in 2027. Democrats Donald Trump Elections Republicans Senate Texas Ted Cruz The Surge Massachusetts J.D. Vance 2026 Midterms 2028 Campaign