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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that never once had lunch on Jeffrey Epstein’s island. [Epstein file comes out.] Oh, come on, that was a brunch.

We’ve got it all this week: Epstein. The Kennedys. Bridge scandals involving new bridges and rival bridge owners. Democratic mega-gerrymanders. TARIFF VOTES.

But the concept of this edition—in the Sgt. Pepper’s sense of a “concept,” in that it ends after a couple of tracks—is the audience of one, and how some Trump administration appointees will almost intentionally do their jobs badly to stay in the boss’s good graces. Unusual dynamic. Cheers!

Getting no-hit by a federal grand jury.

On Tuesday, prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office in the District of Columbia, led by Jeanine Pirro, sought and failed to indict six Democratic lawmakers—four House members and two senators—who recorded a social media video last year in which they reminded service members of their obligation to refuse illegal orders. What were the exact charges? Who knows. Whatever they were, the grand jury in D.C. didn’t just reject them as a body. As NBC News reported, zero members of the grand jury found the charges up to snuff. Separately, a judge this week smacked down Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s attempt to punish Sen. Mark Kelly, a veteran and one of the six who made the video, saying that Hegseth’s targeting of Kelly had “trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms.”

Why would Pirro and Hegseth subject themselves to such total humiliation and stark legal rebuke? Don’t they realize that a neutral observer would consider them historically bad at their jobs? Their audience of one, though, is not a neutral observer. The November video that those six Democrats released incensed Donald Trump, who posted on social media at the time that it was “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL” and “punishable by DEATH!” There seems to be an understanding among Trump’s political appointees now that not doing the illegal action—refusing an illegal order, as one might put it—isn’t an option. Instead, it’s better to humor him by pursuing it and letting some element of the legal system—a judge, a grand jury—do the dirty work of keeping the rule of law at least somewhat intact. And while it’s nice when the legal system does its job, the Surge still believes that the best course of action is for government officials not to violate the constitutional rights of Trump’s enemies in the first place.

No law when the stock market’s good.

We must still allow ourselves to be shocked from time to time, and Attorney General Pam Bondi’s performance before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday ably did the job. She shouted and yelled and acted as if she were the one who was being shouted and yelled at, responded to........

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