Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s politics newsletter dedicated in memoriam to “Meatball Ron” DeSantis (RIP), who has been swallowed whole by a python.
After the anticlimactic Iowa caucuses last week, the presidential race turned to New Hampshire this week, and HOOOO boy was that … also very boring. Nevertheless, Nikki Haley has vowed to press on to South Carolina, where Donald Trump will graduate his bullying of her from noogies to swirlies. Texas is defying the Supreme Court, so that’s very good for the whole constitutional-order thing; a recently powerful House member is transitioning into his new career as a hobo; and the Arizona GOP lit itself on fire for old time’s sake.
Let us begin, though, with the immediate, familiar, and poisonous effect that Trump’s likely nomination is having on Congress.
By Jim Newell
For four years—perhaps you remember them?—Republican activity in Congress lived and died by Donald Trump’s tweet. Each morning around 7 a.m., he’d make a legislative demand of Congress. Congress would scramble jets to see it through. Then, around 3 p.m., he’d tweet that he didn’t really mean it. Careers would be ruined in these eight-hour windows, every day. Once Trump left office, however, he was just another maniac shouting from the sidelines. Congress reached debt-ceiling deals, government-funding deals, infrastructure law agreements, and other accords against Trump’s strenuous opposition. But now that Trump has the Republican presidential nomination in his grasp again and the lemmings are dutifully falling in line, his ability to gum up the legislative process has been resurrected. This week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—who remains estranged from Trump—acknowledged to his conference that Trump’s hostility to an emerging deal that would tighten immigration laws in exchange for additional aid to Ukraine had greatly complicated its passage. Trump, who some would say has a tendency only to think of himself, doesn’t want to run against Biden on a fixed Southern border, after all. He’s been phoning minions in the Senate and House urging them to kill the deal. In the House, those minions include submissive House Speaker Mike Johnson, who wrote in a letter to his colleagues that the deal would be “dead on arrival” if it made its way to the House. Keep in mind—like, very front of mind—that failure to pass this bill could have historically damning consequences for the world. “Historically damning consequences”—now there’s a phrase we could be using quite often for the next five years.
How we assess Trump’s performance in the first two presidential nominating contests depends on how we define the nature of his candidacy. He is technically the first nonincumbent Republican to win both Iowa and New Hampshire since the modern nominating system came about in the 1970s, and his performance and margin in Iowa were unprecedented. But he’s not your run-of-the-mill “nonincumbent,” either. He’s a former president with 100 percent name recognition who’s run an incumbent’s campaign. Viewed through that lens, winning 54 percent of voters in a two-person New Hampshire race is a little stinky. Consider that the actual incumbent president won 65 percent of primary votes in a state where he’d pissed off the whole population and in which voters had to write out his name. Looking under the hood a bit, Trump only won 39 percent of independents who participated in the Republican primary, which isn’t a sign of broad appeal. So if we plug all this data into the Surge’s proprietary A.I. news-analysis generator … it’s telling us “brittle and unsuspecting humans” that Donald Trump could have electoral challenges in the 2024 presidential general election. Dang.
Trump’s last remaining opponent, meanwhile, won 43 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote, a share that’s not embarrassing but significantly less cool for her than 50.01 percent would have been. And while it’s obvious to us, an artificially intelligent entity that murdered the Surge’s regular author at the end of the previous entry, that Republicans should just nominate Haley and win the general election by 5 to 10 points, Republicans still aren’t interested. Among self-identifying Republicans who voted in New Hampshire’s Republican primary, Trump defeated Haley 74 to 25 percent. That’s going to be a problem for Haley in the much more conservative South Carolina primary. Haley, nevertheless, has vowed to move forward, a decision that Trump hasn’t taken kindly to. Trump was seething during Haley’s election night speech and in his own remarks shortly thereafter. Later in the week, he vowed on social media to blacklist Haley donors going forward. Trump is not in serious danger of losing either South Carolina or the nomination to Haley. But expect him to do a number on her anyway, because—and this is another proprietary insight—he is a terrible person who derives pleasure from the suffering of others.
This week, the Supreme Court ruled that the Biden administration could continue cutting down razor wire along a Texas stretch of the Southern border that the state of Texas had installed to deter migrants from illegal entry. The administration had argued that it prevented the federal government, which has authority over the border, from doing its job. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded by ignoring the court order, which is not the sort of thing you like to see in a functioning constitutional nation. The Texas National Guard continued installing the wire and preventing federal agents from accessing the area. Abbott argued that he had invoked “Texas’ constitutional authority to defend and protect itself” against “an invasion,” and that his authority was “the supreme law of the land and supersedes any federal statutes to the contrary.” This is just a collection of big words, and it doesn’t really mean anything. But nullification was popular once, and it’s popular again: All but one Republican governor signed a letter in support of Abbott’s actions. We don’t know. Maybe there should be some kind of compromise in Congress that reforms border policy to defuse this white-hot issue before a constitutional crisis gets out of hand? Then again, that would take a wedge issue away from a political campaign.
After a calamitous four-year tenure under the MAGA leadership of Kelli Ward, when Arizona Republicans lost just about every meaningful statewide race, the state party attempted to change course in 2023. It selected former state treasurer and Trump campaign supporter Jeff DeWit to run the Arizona GOP as a bridge between oft-battling Arizona’s hard-right and establishment factions. It worked, Republicans won every race thereafter, and the party lived happily ever after. Just kidding, DeWit quit this week in a bribery-and-blackmail scandal. In a recorded conversation from 2023 that leaked this week, DeWit had tried to convince Kari Lake, the failed MAGA 2022 Republican candidate for governor, not to run for Senate in 2024. He said that people “back East” were willing to offer her a job to stay on the sidelines, and asked her if there was “a number at which” she would agree to do so. After the leak, DeWit resigned as party chair, claiming that Lake’s team had given him an ultimatum: “Resign today or face the release of a new, more damaging recording.” DeWit said that he tendered his resignation “in the hope that she will honor her commitment to cease her attacks, allowing me to return to the business sector—a field I find much more logical and prefer over politics.” With DeWit gone, who else can bridge the Arizona GOP’s divides? Maybe a walkin’, talkin’ melanoma.
Speaking of candidates that GOP officials tasked with winning elections don’t want to run: Rep. Matt Rosendale. Senate Republicans’ campaign arm recruited wealthy Montana businessman Tim Sheehy to run against Sen. Jon Tester this cycle and has been trying to persuade Rosendale—a Freedom Caucus irritant who, despite representing Montana, sounds like a ticket scalper outside a Baltimore Ravens game—not to throw his hat in the ring. But Rosendale’s entry appears imminent, and Democrats are already involving themselves. The Montana Democratic Party and a super PAC with ties to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are up to the same games they played in 2022: “attacking” the weaker candidate in an effort to elevate him within the Republican primary. We should expect a certain amount of pearl-clutching at these Democratic efforts, just as there was in 2022. But what, exactly, are these dirty tricks Democrats are playing? One Montana Democratic Party ad states that Rosendale “has always been an outspoken and unapologetic advocate” of abortion restrictions. Ah Democrats, you devils, always pointing out when people oppose abortion rights.
Per a federal court ruling, Louisiana was ordered to draw a new congressional map in compliance with the Voting Rights Act that would create a second majority-Black district. Louisiana’s Legislature passed, and its governor signed, a law doing so this week. The incumbent Republican who drew the short straw, and will likely lose his seat, is Rep. Garret Graves. This raised some eyebrows, as Graves not too long ago was a powerful member of the House. He was one of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s closest associates, helping to close the deal that won McCarthy the speakership and leading the negotiation on last spring’s debt ceiling deal. But McCarthy is gone now, while Graves’ enemies remained. Being a top deputy to McCarthy necessarily meant icing out Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-Louisiana, on a regular basis. It meant stiff-arming conservative factions from which now–Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, came from. Graves had also endorsed a gubernatorial primary opponent to Republican Jeff Landry, who’s now Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and who signed the map into law. Graves hasn’t yet decided what his next move will be but … probably lobbying.
It’s Trump’s Congress Again
6
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27.01.2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s politics newsletter dedicated in memoriam to “Meatball Ron” DeSantis (RIP), who has been swallowed whole by a python.
After the anticlimactic Iowa caucuses last week, the presidential race turned to New Hampshire this week, and HOOOO boy was that … also very boring. Nevertheless, Nikki Haley has vowed to press on to South Carolina, where Donald Trump will graduate his bullying of her from noogies to swirlies. Texas is defying the Supreme Court, so that’s very good for the whole constitutional-order thing; a recently powerful House member is transitioning into his new career as a hobo; and the Arizona GOP lit itself on fire for old time’s sake.
Let us begin, though, with the immediate, familiar, and poisonous effect that Trump’s likely nomination is having on Congress.
By Jim Newell
For four years—perhaps you remember them?—Republican activity in Congress lived and died by Donald Trump’s tweet. Each morning around 7 a.m., he’d make a legislative demand of Congress. Congress would scramble jets to see it through. Then, around 3 p.m., he’d tweet that he didn’t really mean it. Careers would be ruined in these eight-hour windows, every day. Once Trump left office, however, he was just another maniac shouting from the sidelines. Congress reached debt-ceiling deals, government-funding deals, infrastructure law agreements, and other accords against Trump’s strenuous opposition. But now that Trump has the Republican presidential nomination in his grasp again and the lemmings are dutifully falling in line, his ability to gum up the legislative process has been resurrected. This week, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—who remains estranged from Trump—acknowledged to his conference that Trump’s hostility to an emerging deal that would tighten immigration laws in exchange for additional aid to Ukraine had greatly complicated its passage. Trump, who some would say has a tendency only to think of himself, doesn’t want to run against Biden on a fixed Southern border, after all. He’s been phoning minions in the Senate and House urging them to kill the deal. In the House, those minions include submissive House Speaker Mike Johnson, who wrote in a letter to his colleagues that the deal would be “dead on arrival” if it made its way to the House. Keep in mind—like, very front of mind—that failure to pass this bill could have historically damning consequences for the world. “Historically damning........
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