Welcome to the Surge, Slate’s weekly guide to the most relevant players of the moment in the world of politics. Or, rather, it’s a guide to that stuff that usually comes out weekly; as we forgot to mention in our most-recent edition, published 14 days ago, we take certain holidays off. Our deepest apologies to anyone who woke up last Saturday, found their inbox empty, and has spent the subsequent 168 hours on hold with their email provider’s customer service representatives while intermittently demanding to know “who stole the Thanksgiving Surge.”
I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, substituting temporarily for Jim Newell, and this week we’ve got more Santos, some truly wild geopolitical intrigue, and Kevin McCarthy taking a stand at the exact moment it no longer mattered. But first: Drumpf.
By Ben Mathis-Lilley
A lot of the coverage of Donald Trump’s campaign at the moment focuses on what you might describe, in an extremely value-neutral way, as his strengths. He’s the current polling favorite to win the presidency, after all, despite having lost the previous election and being perhaps the most-indicted man in America; clearly, his personality and policy predilections have a hold on certain voters that should not be underestimated. On the other hand, you can overstate the extent to which the guy is a political genius. One case in point would be his agonizingly extended first-term effort to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, which was hampered by the twin problems of the ACA’s coverage guarantees being popular and Trump’s having no personal interest in actually coming up with a plan to fulfill the “replace” part of the slogan. The effort ended up failing on John McCain’s famous thumbs-down vote but still alienated enough voters to propel the Democratic Party toward a strong showing in the 2018 midterms. Last week, Trump demonstrated that he did not learn any lessons at all from the experience, declaring on Truth Social that Obamacare “sucks” (LOL) and that he would try, again, to repeal it if elected. As Politico reports, this apparently all happened because Trump happened to see a Wall Street Journal editorial about Elizabeth Warren that mentioned the ACA. It has also reportedly made Joe Biden’s campaign advisers ecstatic, given that Obamacare’s protection for so-called preexisting condition coverage is probably the most universally popular thing the Democratic Party is associated with. Expect to hear a lot more about the subject going forward, especially if you plan on watching any television in a swing state next fall.
Well, it finally happened: George Santos got expelled from Congress, and all it took was his lying about every aspect of his identity and family history, getting indicted on an estimated 1 million federal charges of campaign-finance fraud, and being the subject of an official House ethics committee report which concluded that those fraud allegations are, to paraphrase, super-duper credible. (Santos says he is not guilty and that the ethics report was a “smear.”) The ax came down Friday in a 311–114 House vote. In comical "quote from man stabbed" fashion, Santos had declared two days before that it was time for his enemies in the chamber to “put up or shut up.” Put up they did! His criminal trial is in September; in the meantime, he says he’ll be working to elect Trump, which is actually the kind of offer that Trump is potentially Trumpian enough to take him up on (see above). He’ll also probably have the chance to meet with a range of book publishers and reality-TV producers, should he choose to go that route, which, I think it is fair to say, he probably does, because he likes attention and, if you’ll recall, does not actually have any meaningful professional skills or experience. In the end, he becomes the first person expelled from the House for a reason besides a criminal conviction or participation in the Confederacy—which, yes, is a precedent that could be abused, but is also, considering that we are talking about someone who won election while claiming to have been a star volleyball player at a college he didn’t even attend, probably fair.
Billionaire Charles Koch, at 88, remains a major force for fiscal libertarianism in the Republican Party via his Americans for Prosperity advocacy group. (Koch’s brother David, his longtime partner in influence-building, died in 2019.) The organization does not care for Donald Trump, who is a critic of the free-trade tariff and immigration policies that the Kochs have long championed; the AFP is also not fond of the way he drags down other GOP candidates with his antics and insurrections and whatnot. As such, the group’s super PAC just announced that it is supporting Nikki Haley in the presidential primary. This is good news for Haley, who has risen to a very modest tie for second place in the polls, because AFP plans to back up its endorsement by spending money on advertising and canvassing—and as an outfit that was created by wealthy industrialists to benefit wealthy industrialists, it has a lot of money. She’s also pursuing the support of two other Trump-averse conservative megadonors—Home Depot billionaire Ken Langone and hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin—in a gambit that high-level fundraisers call “going for the Kenfecta.” (They do not call it that.) That said, Ron DeSantis is also supported by a bunch of absolutely loaded donors by way of a super PAC that may as well be pouring its money into the Gulf of Mexico for all the good it’s doing. (Remember the elite training facility for teaching people how to knock on doors?) But if Haley does fizzle out, it doesn’t seem like it will be for lack of cash.
In September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau suggested that there was reason to believe that the government of India had played a role in the British Columbia murder of an Indian emigrant and Canadian citizen named Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Nijjar was an advocate of “Sikh separatism,” whose goal is the creation of an independent Sikh state, and had been accused of involvement in terrorism by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist administration. (There is no public evidence that Nijjar was involved in violent activity, and he was never accused of such by any entity besides the Modi government.) That case remains unresolved—and this Wednesday, the Department of Justice announced that it had charged an Indian citizen named Nikhil Gupta for attempting, at the behest of a representative of the Indian government, to hire a gunman to murder a different Sikh separatist, this time in the U.S. (Gupta was arrested in the Czech Republic at the U.S.’s request and is currently being held there pending potential extradition.) What’s more, the indictment filed against Gupta presents evidence that his Indian handler had plans to arrange for the murder of several other perceived enemies of the Modi regime in North America as well. While it’s not clear that Modi knew about or approved the plot, the New York Times says the news that someone high up in the Indian government authorized a campaign of U.S.-soil assassinations has been met in the White House, which hosted Modi for a diplomatic visit in June, with “disbelief.” Which seems like a reasonable reaction!
California Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s two-faced response to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been well-documented. In a floor speech, he said that Donald Trump bore responsibility for that day’s violence; in private, he told other Republicans that he was fed up and would tell Trump personally that he should resign. (At the time, McCarthy was House minority leader.) Then he flew to Mar-a-Lago, took a picture with Trump, and spent the next two-plus years doing whatever he could to accommodate the man and his supporters so as not to jeopardize his chances of becoming speaker of the House. Now that McCarthy has lost the speaker job, though, it appears that he’s gone back to being a badass who doesn’t take any of Trump’s BS—or so he’d have us believe. According to the Washington Post, McCarthy has been telling associates that after his speakership ended, he confronted the ex-president over his failure to help him keep his position, telling Trump, quote, “Fuck you.” On the other hand, in a new book, apostate Republican and former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney says that McCarthy claimed to her that he only made his post–Jan. 6 visit to Florida because Trump was “depressed” and “not eating” at the time. Tough and tender, this guy.
Polling currently pegs Joe Biden as an underdog in a number of swing states, which is good for Republicans. What’s not great for Republicans is that their party organizations in a few of those states have been taken over by Q-brained election conspiracy theorists who appear unable to manage the basic functions of politics—or, like, being an adult. Take, for example, Michigan’s Kristina Karamo, who made a name for herself in the local GOP by alleging massive Democratic voter fraud in 2020, then ran for secretary of state in 2022 and lost by a robust 14 points. Karamo, who claims her 2022 election was also stolen—to repeat, she lost by 14 points; apparently it was the Lufthansa heist of ballot fraud—was then voted chair of the state party. Her tenure has been marked by what Bridge Michigan describes as “significant fundraising struggles, physical fights at party events and a string of controversies, including her comparison of gun control legislation to the Holocaust.” (That’s all? Tough crowd!) According to Bridge, the party is now in danger of defaulting on its line of credit, which has galvanized a movement to replace Karamo. She has responded by promising to be more responsible and transparent with the group’s finances. Kidding! She’s actually responded by removing her critics from their positions. Good stuff, Michigan Republicans.
Cold War–era Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger died this week. For an assessment of his brutal career that’s both balanced and damning, we’d recommend this retrospective by Obama administration foreign policy adviser Ben Rhodes. “History is written by men like Henry Kissinger,” Rhodes writes, “not by the victims of superpower bombing campaigns, including children in Laos, who continue to be killed by the unexploded bombs that litter their country.” That may be true, but his obituaries also widely recognize that Kissinger unleashed a great deal of carnage and death into the world in the name of maintaining, in a very vague sense, the United States' security and “credibility.” And that has already helped strengthen the convictions of progressives who believe that the United States, and in particular the Democratic Party, should not be providing unconditional support to the Israeli military, whose response to the Oct. 7 massacres committed by Hamas has already killed an estimated 15,000 Palestinians.
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