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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that thought it was closely guarding its proprietary news-ranking formula only to discover that the U.S. trade representative just used the same exact one to destroy the global economy.
You don’t need us to tell you: We are in deep, folks. There is an internet dingbat leading purges on the National Security Council. There is a man talking on the Senate floor for 25 hours straight. There is a chamber of Congress shutting down because of a dispute about internal parental-leave policy. There are trillions in tax cuts, shrouded by a cloak of darkness, where the Senate parliamentarian can’t see them.
There is a president who’s gone and done it (pressed all the buttons to see what would happen).
1.
Donald Trump
This week, President Trump blew it all up. In a Wednesday ceremony, he revealed his baseline universal tariffs and his “reciprocal” tariffs, which aren’t really reciprocal at all and rely on a crude formula potentially devised by an A.I. chatbot. This supreme and unholy amateurism produced such outputs as a 47 percent import tax on the poor island nation that produces most of the world’s vanilla; a 50 percent import tax that will “kill” Lesotho’s economy for its crime of exporting clothes and not having enough money to buy anything in return; and, yes, a 10 percent tax on a bunch of penguins. It’s all too hard to process “Liberation Day” in full. That’s going to be a job for historians. But let’s set aside, for the moment, the sharp increase in the likelihood of recession, inflation, and generally a global economic meltdown that this augurs. Let’s even set aside how this is probably lights-out for American global leadership and how, between this gut punch to the economic world order and Trump’s months of spurning military allies and abandoning soft power, China’s going to have a lot of new potential friends knocking on its door. What might be the most frightening is what it revealed about how decisions get made in this White House. The policy is slop, developed in secret and implemented unilaterally, unraveling 80 years of work at the snap of a finger. There are no longer any impediments between the weird ideas Trump developed in 1986 and their actualization. There’s no one to talk him out of anything. He is one-sixteenth of the way through his term.
2.
Elon Musk
We had elections this week! Whoop-de-doo! In Florida’s special elections, Republicans held their two deep-red congressional seats, while underperforming their November margins by 15 to 20 points. The showstopper of the night, though, was the Wisconsin Supreme Court election, which would determine the balance of power in the all-important swing state. The liberal candidate, Susan Crawford, defeated the conservative candidate, Brad Schimel, by 10 percentage points. The race would have drawn its share of national attention on its own terms. But the stakes were heightened when Elon Musk got involved, putting tens of millions of dollars behind Schimel and showing up in person to deliver jumbo-sized million-dollar checks at a rally. Intentionally or not, he made the race a referendum on himself, while arguing that its outcome might “decide the future of America and Western civilization.” The outcome seems mostly to have decided how long Musk will remain welcome in D.C.: Politico reported, the day after the special election, that Trump has been telling people that Musk will begin receding into the background soon. We’ll see about that, but the Wisconsin race made clear what a liability Musk has become.
3.
Anna Paulina Luna
Last week, we wrote about how the Florida Republican was working to force a vote on her resolution to allow members who are new parents to vote by proxy for 12 weeks—and the aggressive resistance she was meeting from GOP leadership and fellow conservatives. In an attempt to thwart her urged by the Freedom Caucus, Speaker Mike Johnson tried to pass a rule that would kill Luna’s bill. To up the ante, the same rule would’ve teed up votes on bills requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and to prevent district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions. In other words, GOP leaders were daring Luna and her allies to impede Trump’s agenda to get their parental-leave policy. But Luna and eight other Republicans didn’t flinch, joining Democrats to tank the rule vote. Johnson, piqued, dismissed the House for the remainder of the week on a Tuesday afternoon in an attempt to shame Luna. Unfortunately for Johnson, Trump didn’t join him in that effort, instead going on the record to say that he liked Luna’s resolution and didn’t “know why it’s so controversial.” That directive from on high appears to have gotten Johnson to start negotiating, something he could have done months ago instead of emptying the arsenal to stop new parents from temporarily proxy voting. Isn’t it nice to have a quaint congressional-procedure subplot while everything else in the world goes off the rails? Let’s do another one next, from the Senate side.
4.
Lindsey Graham
The Surge wrote last month about a budgeting sleight of hand that Senate Republicans were hoping to use to disguise the cost of their planned tax cuts: using a current-policy baseline to argue that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts would cost nothing on paper (even though they’ll cost $4 trillion over a decade). But first, they needed to ensure that Senate rules and precedent allowed them to do this. After weeks of consultations with the parliamentarian—Elizabeth MacDonough, aka “the Hammer,” as insider publications call her—Senate Republicans decided this week that they didn’t actually need her to greenlight this after all. Instead, they’ve decided, Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham can himself determine which baseline to use. Republicans described this move as bypassing the parliamentarian, rather than “overruling” her. But that may be a distinction without a difference, because bypassing the parliamentarian (because you’re scared of what she’ll say) will also erode enforcement of the guardrails on the filibuster-proof reconciliation process. If Democrats retake power and say that “Medicare for All” has zero deficit impact because they’ve determined it to be “current policy,” and that the parliamentarian wasn’t consulted because she’d been mysteriously stuffed in a locker, no complaining is allowed.
5.
Cory Booker
A rule is a rule! If the New Jersey senator’s speech had been an hour shorter, he would not have been in the Surge this week. Real estate is valuable here, and we don’t give out prizes for speeches under 25 hours. But this week, Booker broke the 68-year record held by South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond for his filibuster of the 1957 Civil Rights Act. (Thurmond would go on to serve for one million additional years after that.) Booker’s speech was a generalized rant against everything the Trump administration has been doing, interspersed with colloquies with his Democratic colleagues. We’ll put our cards on the table: Booker is a fine senator, but he’s a ham. He practices a politics of inspiration, and the Surge recoils at politicians who try to inspire us. Democrats, though, need this. They need to try stuff. Their strongest tool to rein in Trump isn’t the few, far-between, and illusory moments of legislative leverage. It’s not the courts. They have to get the word out about what Trump is doing—or at least get the headline out that a senator thinks it’s bad enough to not eat, drink, or pee for much longer than is medically advisable—and why it’s toxic. Sure, the coverage of Booker’s speech was overtaken by Trump’s decision the following day to make America a rogue state. That can be some other senator’s 25-hour assignment the next week.
6.
Tim Kaine
The power to impose tariffs is one the Constitution gives to Congress—not the president. Only now is Congress recognizing that its various efforts over the past 100 years to give the executive some tariff authority here, some tariff authority there, ends up with the president getting all the authority he needs to create a situation where a nearly 80-year-old with vast untreated issues might abuse the power as a form of self-medication. And in response to Liberation Day, we saw the very beginnings of some pushback this week. Trump invoked much of his tariff authority from a 1977 emergency law that’s never before been used for this purpose. The upside to this, though, is that such emergencies can be terminated by simple majority votes in Congress. Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine led a charge this week to terminate the emergency declaration underpinning Trump’s on-again, off-again Canada tariffs, and his resolution passed the Senate, with four Republicans (Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Mitch McConnell, and Susan Collins) joining all Democrats. Trump is invoking the same emergency law—the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—for the universal and “reciprocal” tariffs he announced Wednesday, so there’s a similar opportunity to reject those too. But the worse the effects of Trump’s tariffs get, the more opportunity there is to think bigger. On Thursday, Sens. Chuck Grassley and Maria Cantwell introduced a bill that would require any new tariffs to be approved by Congress within 60 days or they’d expire. A proposal like this, over the past few days, has gone from something that Congress should do to something it’s obligated to do.
7.
Laura Loomer
Remember Signalgate? That was so silly when it happened, 150 years ago. And while everyone involved in “Houthi PC small group” still has a job, the ramifications within the executive branch are still being felt. Our stated belief has been that if someone—namely national security adviser Michael Waltz—lost their job, it would be more the result of internal battles between the MAGA and traditional GOP wings of the foreign-policy teams than accountability for insecure communications practices. That’s begun to happen, though in a stupider way than we’d predicted. Laura Loomer, a lunatic online-brained conspiracy theorist whom then–campaign manager Susie Wiles worked diligently to keep away from Trump’s ear, apparently has Trump’s ear yet again. In an Oval Office meeting with Trump this week—yikes!—Loomer presented him with a “list of people she believed were disloyal to the president” primarily on the National Security Council. Six NSC officials were fired shortly thereafter, even though Waltz and his deputy survived. Trump still doesn’t want to fire Waltz and give the media credit for a “scalp.” So he just moved one rung lower, at the behest of a dingbat from the internet. Well! That’s enough politics content for today. Enjoy the spring weekend!
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