Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s Saturday-morning rundown of the most impactful and/or hugely embarrassing figures from the week in politics. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who took the week off to launch a 24-hour fresh-pasta delivery service called Newell’s New Noodles Nightly. (We wish him the best of luck in overcoming the Washington Post’s description of his product as a “nightmare noodle no-no.”)
This week, we’ve got a surprising dropout in the state that simply refuses to have a normal Senate race, a big hubbub at NBC about whether journalists should help overthrow the government, and a classic case of accidentally trying to get the Gonzaga men’s basketball team deported. But first, it’s time for more of this newsletter’s trademark analysis of the equities markets.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
America’s most frequent courtroom visitor is in a bit of a pinch right now. He needs to find $175 million, stat, or Big Tony (New York Attorney General Letitia James) is going to break his legs (potentially seize some of his assets in order to cover the judgment that was entered against him in his civil fraud trial). This week, though, the company that operates Trump’s small-time Twitter-esque Truth Social platform went public; you can now buy shares of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. on the NASDAQ, ticker symbol DJT. Those shares are worth $62 as of press time, and Trump owns 58 percent of them, which means that he’s technically got more than $4 billion in Truth Social stock. The problem is that the value of the stock appears to be dependent on MAGA “retail investors” who are holding it in order to show their solidarity with Trump and/or hoping that he’ll win reelection and it’ll gain value by being the president’s company. If he starts trying to dump $175 million of it to cover his legal needs, he might crash its price by flooding the market and triggering a sell-off. And given that the company’s actual assets are almost worthless, there’s basically no floor to how low the price could go. (Well, “zero” is the floor.) In sum, the deep state and the rules of supply and demand might have him over a barrel on this one.
Joe Biden’s been doing better lately in head-to-head polls against Donald Trump, like the one Quinnipiac released Wednesday. The general election, though, isn’t a head-to-head race: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running as an independent, as is Cornel West, and Jill Stein is running again for the Green Party. When those candidates were included in Quinnipiac’s poll, Biden went from beating Trump by 3 points to losing to him by 1, with RFK Jr. bringing in a hearty 13 percent. A lot of that RFK support comes from younger voters, and Biden will likely eradicate some large chunk of it by blasting out ads that identify Kennedy (correctly!) as an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist and big-time supporter of Israel’s offensive in Gaza. But it’s a free country, and Kennedy is allowed to stay in the race, running his own ads, saying whatever, and possibly throwing the election to Trump, for as long as he wants. That’s particularly true now that he has chosen Nicole Shanahan, a wealthy Silicon Valley lawyer (and the ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin) as his running mate. The thinking, apparently, is that she’ll make up for what she lacks in name recognition by donating money to the campaign and raising it from other lib-hating tech-world contrarians. And to answer your question, which the Surge also asked immediately: She is not related to 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan or his Super Bowl–winning father Mike, who also coached in San Francisco. As far as we know, that Bay Area Shanahan family is sticking to sports.
“Mayor” Pete Buttigieg was rewarded for dropping out of the 2020 presidential race and endorsing Joe Biden by being given a job as the secretary of transportation. That’s not historically one of the higher-profile Cabinet posts, but Buttigieg has had an eventful tenure. In addition to his role in carrying out Biden’s bajillion-dollar plan to rebuild American infrastructure, he’s been the public face of the federal response to the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, the Southwest Airlines flight cancellation epidemic, and now the terrifying, deadly collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore. (Oh, and then there’s Boeing!) Our very informal understanding is that transportation policy wonks think Buttigieg has done fairly well in his role so far; now, all he has to do is secure enough emergency funding from a barely functioning Congress to immediately clear Baltimore Harbor and build a bridge over it while preventing supply-chain fallout at the Port of Baltimore from creating a crisis in the consumer automotive market, among other things. Running the United States Department of Transportation, it turns out, isn’t all fun and games.
Up in the substitute Surge’s adopted home state, the expectation until last fall was that Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez would run for reelection in 2024 (and win, because New Jersey is now heavily blue). But then old Bob got indicted for allegedly taking bribes. Rep. Andy Kim, a promising-seeming Obama administration alum, jumped into the race to replace him, and so did Tammy Murphy, the wife of current New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy. A number of other state politicians endorsed her quickly, likely because they wanted to make sure that they stayed in good graces with her husband—but then, when that vaguely corrupt-seeming phenomenon became a subject of widespread discussion, Kim enjoyed his own counter-surge, to the point that the mayor of Jersey City un-endorsed Murphy and threw his support to her opponent. Then, just last week, Menendez announced that if he’s not convicted at trial, he’ll run in November as an independent. And that’s not even what this Surge entry is about! What this Surge entry is about is that on Sunday, Tammy Murphy suddenly dropped out of the race. What she reportedly concluded was that the race was shaping up to be too “bloody” for her taste; our interpretation of that is that she and her husband, who is rumored to be interested in running for president, didn’t want to embitter potential allies in the progressive community by going negative on Kim. (Especially if it wasn’t guaranteed to work.) And now, Andy Kim is your presumed next senator from New Jersey, at least until next week.
It’s not unheard of for journalists to be annoyed when TV news organizations hire former politicians and political operatives who’ve previously gotten caught lying to the press. That dynamic has become more tense, though, in the Trump era. Lying about a scandal is one thing; mounting an extended, preposterous, historically cynical campaign of falsehoods that ends with a mob attack on the Capitol is another. As chair of the Republican National Committee in 2020, Ronna McDaniel was one of the people responsible for the buildup to Jan. 6—but that didn’t stop the executives at NBC from giving her a reported $300,000 deal to provide commentary on their news shows after she stepped down from her RNC role this month. That irritated the journalists at the channel to the point that former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd complained about it on air, with McDaniel present, last Sunday. (It was a strong statement coming from Todd, who himself was criticized for going way too easy on Republicans when he hosted the show.) Tuesday, NBC announced that it was reversing itself and would no longer employ McDaniel. Of course, that’s not the end of it: McDaniel is hiring a lawyer to seek a monetary settlement from the network and will be dining out on this for the rest of her career as an example of being silenced or canceled or whatever.
Earlier this year, House Republicans impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, for failing to keep asylum-seekers at the southern border in federal custody while their asylum claims are being adjudicated. (Mayorkas thus became the first sitting Cabinet member to be impeached.) In Reality World, it is acknowledged by members of both parties that there are not nearly enough federal facilities or border personnel to actually achieve that goal, and House Republicans also recently rejected a bill that would have put funding toward the problem. Mayorkas is moreover 100 percent certainly going to be acquitted by the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats and generally has slightly less tolerance for far-right nonsense than the House does. All that notwithstanding, Speaker Mike Johnson announced this week that the House will be “transmitting” articles of impeachment to the Senate on April 10. The best possible spin on this is that Johnson, by letting his fringiest members spend months of the chamber’s time pushing through an unprecedented and transparently pointless impeachment, will have some leeway to do a tiny bit more actual legislating stuff going forward. So, that’s where we’re at.
Matt Maddock is a state legislator in Michigan. On Wednesday, he posted photographs of an airplane and a few buses on the service formerly known as Twitter. “Three busses just loaded up with illegal invaders at Detroit Metro,” he wrote. “Anyone have any idea where they’re headed with their police escort?” He tagged the chair of the state party, Pete Hoekstra, who reposted the message. Turns out that some folks did know where the buses were headed, because they were carrying the Gonzaga men’s basketball team, which was in town to play a Friday-night NCAA Tournament game against Purdue. Anyone else thinking what I’m thinking (that Matt Maddock is a good candidate to fill the Ronna McDaniel spot at NBC News)?
The Problem With Donald Trump’s Latest Escape Hatch
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30.03.2024
Welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s Saturday-morning rundown of the most impactful and/or hugely embarrassing figures from the week in politics. I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who took the week off to launch a 24-hour fresh-pasta delivery service called Newell’s New Noodles Nightly. (We wish him the best of luck in overcoming the Washington Post’s description of his product as a “nightmare noodle no-no.”)
This week, we’ve got a surprising dropout in the state that simply refuses to have a normal Senate race, a big hubbub at NBC about whether journalists should help overthrow the government, and a classic case of accidentally trying to get the Gonzaga men’s basketball team deported. But first, it’s time for more of this newsletter’s trademark analysis of the equities markets.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
America’s most frequent courtroom visitor is in a bit of a pinch right now. He needs to find $175 million, stat, or Big Tony (New York Attorney General Letitia James) is going to break his legs (potentially seize some of his assets in order to cover the judgment that was entered against him in his civil fraud trial). This week, though, the company that operates Trump’s small-time Twitter-esque Truth Social platform went public; you can now buy shares of Trump Media & Technology Group Corp. on the NASDAQ, ticker symbol DJT. Those shares are worth $62 as of press time, and Trump owns 58 percent of them, which means that he’s technically got more than $4 billion in Truth Social stock. The problem is that the value of the stock appears to be dependent on MAGA “retail investors” who are holding it in order to show their solidarity with Trump and/or hoping that he’ll win reelection and it’ll gain value by being the president’s company. If he starts trying to dump $175 million of it to cover his legal needs, he might crash its price by flooding the market and triggering a sell-off. And given that the company’s actual assets are almost worthless, there’s basically no floor to how low the price could go. (Well, “zero” is the floor.) In sum, the deep state and the rules of supply and demand might have him over a barrel on this one.
Joe Biden’s been doing better lately in head-to-head polls against Donald Trump, like the one Quinnipiac released Wednesday. The general election, though, isn’t a head-to-head race: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running as an independent, as is Cornel West, and........
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