Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, the only Washington institution that doesn’t close for business under 2 inches of snow.
This could be the week that Donald Trump finishes off his primary competition, this time with a final sprinkling of racism. Congress has extended government funding for a spell and now gets to move ahead—or not—on the thing that really matters. The outlook is Bob Bad for Freedom Caucus Chair Bob Good, and Elise Stefanik’s decision to carry a poster 24/7 that reads “I want to be vice president” suggests she may be angling to be Trump’s vice president. Plus: Asa-gate.
Allow us to begin with our most special boy.
By Jim Newell
For an instant following his romp in the Iowa caucuses Monday night, Trump was magnanimous toward his nearest competitors. He congratulated Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley for their performance, saying, “I think they both actually did very well, I do. I think they did very well.” That out-of-character graciousness ended in a snap as attention turned to this coming Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary. Having already taken DeSantis’ soul by crushing him by 30 points in Iowa, where the Florida governor bet everything, he’s now trying to do the same to Haley in New Hampshire. Most of his hits on her haven’t been especially creative. They’re the things he’d say about any Republican in his path. Subject lines from his campaign press operation the day after the Iowa caucuses included, for example, “Nikki Haley Is Weak On Immigration And Opposes A Border Wall,” “Nikki Haley Is Funded By Democrats, Wall Street, & Globalists,” and “Nikki Haley Loves China.” Where he’s been able to tailor his broadsides to Haley more specifically is through racism. Having already promoted a false birther conspiracy against her, Trump this week began referring to her as “Nimrada,” a misspelling of her legal first name, Nimarata. By Friday, he had tinkered it down to “Nimbra,” for whatever reason. Trump is leading Haley by about 13 points in the New Hampshire polling average, and Haley’s momentum in the state may have run out.
Congress funded the government this week on another short-term basis, this time until early March. To do so, Speaker Mike Johnson had to circumvent the House Freedom Caucus and its new chair, Virginia Rep. Bob Good, and rely on Democratic votes to help get the bill across. Good is among the most hard-assed members of the Freedom Caucus, and his demand for the funding bill was that H.R. 2, House Republicans’ partisan border bill, be attached to it. Since this demand would have a) led to a government shutdown and b) gotten H.R. 2 no closer whatsoever to becoming law, Johnson wisely ignored it. Good, in response, threatened to take his ball and go home. And speaking of Bob Good going home: He could, soon, be sent there permanently. Good is facing a primary challenge from state Sen. John McGuire, and Good has one specific right-wing vulnerability: his endorsement of Ron DeSantis over Trump. This hasn’t escaped Trump’s notice, and Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita made waves this week when he told Cardinal News that “Bob Good won’t be electable when we get done with him.” Maybe time for an endorsement switcheroo?
With government funding punted another six weeks, Congress finally has some space to move on what will be the most crucial thing it does, or fails to do, this year: a bipartisan deal that would prevent Russia from extinguishing Ukraine in exchange for tighter immigration and border security policy. We still have not seen the proposal that’s in the works, and in a normal world, we’d say there’s no chance significant immigration reform gets done in a presidential election year (or, really, ever). But the pressure from Senate leaders, the White House, and Western allies to protect Ukraine from Russian seizure is an unusually strong motivator. In particular, this is not only Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top legislative priority for the short term. It may be one of his final major legislative tasks as leader. McConnell has his work cut out trying to put up enough Senate Republican votes for the deal-in-waiting—especially as the MAGA right (including Trump) will be working hard to sabotage the effort. (For that matter, corralling the necessary Democratic votes, given the package’s border provisions and military aid to Israel, won’t be Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s easiest week at the office either.) McConnell’s argument to Republicans this week has been that if Senate Republicans want to do something about the border, this deal is better than anything they’d get under unified Republican control of government, when Democrats would quickly employ the filibuster. The politics of the situation, however, dictate that some Republicans don’t want to do something on the border—they’d prefer to run against President Joe Biden’s unpopular handling of the issue. Expect McConnell to use every tool in his kit to help move this through.
McConnell’s task, though, is nothing compared with what Speaker Mike Johnson will be facing over the Ukraine/border deal. A few months ago, he was Nth place in line to ask staged questions at pointless Judiciary Committee hearings; now he’s being asked—and the decision is his and his alone—to defy House Republican politics in order to save Europe. There’s still some House Republican support for additional Ukraine military aid, but the whip count has been dropping precipitously. Further, members of the right-wing fringe, like Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, have threatened to boot Johnson from his speakership should he work to pass the Senate’s deal. On top of it all, Johnson will have Trump breathing down his neck. The situation in Ukraine is dire enough that some House Democrats have discussed backstopping the speakership of Johnson—whom Democrats like as a person in a way that they never did Kevin McCarthy—in exchange for a vote on the legislation. Johnson has been cautious in his wording, expressing overall skepticism of the deal without explicitly ruling it out. But he won’t get away with the cutesy stuff for much longer. Soon he’ll have to choose between the world and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
After his Iowa whupping, the Florida governor is in dire straits. His campaign strategy to wrest the nomination from Trump is now so absurd that it relies on Trump winning the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. As he lies looking at the stars from his nest in a South Carolina palmetto tree—the best accommodations his campaign can now afford—DeSantis has begun to give voice to regrets. Among those, he conceded this week, was his decision to block out any and all engagement with the mainstream media, demonic Soros leeches though they may be. “I should have just been blanketing,” DeSantis told Hugh Hewitt this week. “I should have gone on all the corporate shows. I should have gone on everything. I started doing that as we got into the end of the summer, and we did it. But we had an opportunity, I think, to come out of the gate and do that and reach a much broader folk.” DeSantis now takes questions from anyone and appears on whatever cable news forum is thrown his way. He’s practically a guest host on Morning Joe. The question for him, though, is: Does he still want to win the presidency? Because the road to the White House runs through an interview with the Surge.
Yep, the presidency is allll up for grabs—the Senate presidency, that is. And as NBC News reported this week, Trump is jazzed up about New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, the No. 4 House Republican, as a potential pick. We should hope so, as she’s worked diligently for the past four years to torch her credibility in the buildup to this very moment. Her transition from moderate establishmentarian to Trump’s shinguard began with her theatrics during the first Trump impeachment in late 2019. The Trumpier and Trumpier she got, the higher she rose in the House leadership ranks. She was one of the earliest to endorse Trump this presidential cycle, doing so amid Trump’s post-midterms nadir in late 2022—a show of loyalty that Trump surely won’t forget. By now, Stefanik’s politics have descended far enough down the rabbit hole that she’s referring to Jan. 6 prisoners as “hostages.” This remark was good suck-up-to-Trump politics in its own right. But now it’s a veritable masterstroke, because New York Rep. Dan Goldman is filing a censure resolution against Stefanik over the remark. “I will ALWAYS stand up for #NY21 & the American people, the Constitution, and President Trump,” Stefanik posted lickety-split after Goldman introduced the censure, replete with a fundraising link. Perhaps Goldman has reasons to want to lock Stefanik in as Trump’s running mate, because a censure would help secure it.
The Iowa caucuses weren’t a completely pointless exercise. The point of the process is to winnow the field to a manageable size, and winnowed the field was. Professional irritant Vivek Ramaswamy, after a rare few hours in which he and his favowite pwesident, Donald Trump, were going after each other, dropped out the night of the caucuses, following a fourth-place finish. “There is no path for me to be the next president,” Ramaswamy told supporters, “absent things that we don’t want to see happen in this country.” (Huh?) He immediately endorsed and began campaigning for Trump. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, similarly, suspended his campaign after a sixth-place finish. (Fifth-place finisher Ryan Binkley, who is some sort of private equity megachurch pastor thing, is continuing onward to New Hampshire and South Carolina.) Interestingly, Hutchinson seems to have earned more press coverage of his exit from the race than coverage-hog Ramaswamy has. Following Hutchinson’s exit, the Democratic National Committee released a statement joking that the news “comes as a shock to those of us who could’ve sworn he had already dropped out.” Enough Democrats cried foul on the snarky hit against Hutchinson—a friendly, non-insane Republican—that White House chief of staff Jeff Zients called him to personally apologize. It’s probably the most coverage Hutchinson has gotten all year. Time for him to jump back in??
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