Hello friends, and welcome to a Surge unlike any other. Well, we guess it’s a lot like the other Surges (perfect).
This week, hoo boy, we’ve got it all. We’ve got Trump. We’ve got abortion. We’ve got Trump and abortion. We’ve got Trump, Kari Lake, abortion, and Arizona. We’ve got a bullet in some guy’s arm. We’ve got questions about the bullet in the arm. We’ve got Lindsey Graham and abortion. What’ve you got, reader? You’ve got some content to read.
That was weird. Anyway …
By Jim Newell
There is a constant to Donald Trump’s actual belief on abortion (or any) policy: He truly doesn’t care. Banned, legal up to a certain number of weeks, mandatory—whatever it is that will get him closer to restoring that Diet Coke button to the Resolute desk, that’s his position. In his first campaign and his presidential term, that meant taking the traditional party line on abortion to prove his bona fides to social conservatives. That effort eventually culminated in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Now that the Dobbs decision and its ever-rolling fallout have turned abortion into Republicans’ top liability this year, though, he’s on defense. In a message this week, Trump said abortion policy should be left to each individual state—i.e., that he wouldn’t campaign on national abortion limits—because “we have to win.” Will this inoculation take? It’s definitely better than campaigning on a national abortion ban. But it won’t at all mitigate Democrats’ plans to spend hundreds of millions, or billions, on the issue. Saying he won’t pursue a legislative abortion ban as president doesn’t address what he or his appointees might push through the executive branch. And he’s on tape over and over again—including the tape where he made this week’s announcement—bragging about how he killed Roe v. Wade through his judicial appointments, which happens to be true. Trump and his orbit have already given Democrats plenty to work with.
Cults are a sweet deal so long as you’re the leader, and one of the beautiful things about being Donald Trump is that he can make decisions like this without fear of blowback from his side. Sure, there’s blowback, but he doesn’t have to fear it. For example, some members of the coalition, like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser and South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, expressed disagreement with Trump’s decision not to pursue a national abortion cutoff. Rather than pacify them, Trump told them both to pound sand. As ever, there are few joys in contemporary politics quite like watching Graham’s near decade of servitude earn him no goodwill with Trump. After saying on Monday that “I respectfully disagree with President Trump’s statement that abortion is a states’ rights issue,” Graham was treated to a daylong social media assault from his master. “I blame myself for Lindsey Graham,” Trump posted in one typical example, “because the only reason he won in the Great State of South Carolina is because I Endorsed him!” One day, all this work Graham has put in over the years will earn him a pass. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not any time in the foreseeable future. But one day. Yeah …
While we’re on the quizzical subject of demonstrating loyalty to Trump and somehow expecting it in return: Speaker Mike Johnson. Johnson organized a visit to Trump this week to discuss “election integrity.” That was a cover story. What Johnson was trying to do, first and foremost, was get his picture taken with Trump. His speakership is dangling by a thread, as he has to move from a spending deal with Democrats that enraged the far right directly into the cauldron that is passing Ukraine assistance. His primary antagonist and would-be overthrower, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, spent the week disseminating lengthy letters to her colleagues about Johnson’s inadequacies. What Johnson is hoping to get from Trump, in addition to the photo with Trump, is some sort of pledge to have his back going forward—and, if not an outright endorsement of a Ukraine assistance bill, at least a nonaggression pact. Trump could be so flattered by Johnson’s visit to kiss the ring, and his show of support for “election integrity,” that he agrees in a minute. And that agreement would last until the second that Trump finds it marginally more appealing to break it.
One more from the merry land of abortion. The fun-allergic members of the Arizona Supreme Court this week decided that an 1864 Arizona Territory law banning abortion remains enforceable, despite the state government’s passage of a 15-week ban in 2022 that was intended to supersede it. This makes life unpleasant for state Republicans in an election year, and one in which a measure enshrining abortion protections is likely to be on the ballot. Perhaps the candidate for whom it’s most unpleasant is Senate hopeful Kari Lake. In a statement after the ruling, Lake expressed strong opposition to enforcement of the 1864 law. But during her proudly far-right gubernatorial run in 2022, Lake had called it a “great law that’s already on the books.” Her campaign tried to argue this week that Lake was referring, then, to the 2022 law, which already had been passed. But the next sentence in her quote referred to the 1864 law by statutory number—“I believe it’s ARS 13-3603”—and described it approvingly as prohibiting “abortion in Arizona except to save the life of a mother.” As the Surge has been told by many a sheriff over the years, there’s nowhere to hide.
The good news politically for Tim Sheehy, the Republican challenger to Montana Sen. Jon Tester, is that it took the Surge much more time than was desirable to understand this convoluted story about the mysterious bullet in his arm, and voters have limited attention spans. But here goes: Sheehy, a former Navy SEAL, has been telling voters that he still has a bullet lodged in his arm from Afghanistan. But as the Washington Post reported this week, Sheehy had told a Glacier National Park ranger in 2015 that the bullet was there because “he accidentally shot himself in the right arm that day when his Colt .45 revolver fell and discharged while he was loading his vehicle in the park.” When pressed about the discrepancy, Sheehy told the Post that he had lied to the ranger in 2015, because he feared a military investigation could be launched into himself and his fellow soldiers over a friendly fire incident were he to have told the truth. He claims he never actually discharged the firearm in Glacier, and the reason he had needed medical attention that day—which prompted the chat with the park ranger—was from an injury he sustained while slipping on ice. Well! This elaborate story of his is either true or it’s going to kill his campaign. Mitch McConnell and Steve Daines, who had recruited him to stave off a wackadoo candidate from taking the nomination, will be watching closely.
Will there be presidential debates this fall? God we hope not, we don’t want to work those nights … Er, let’s hope so, for democracy! One prevailing thought the Surge sees among Democrats, though, is that if they don’t happen, it will be because Trump refuses to do so. But that doesn’t really align with the signals coming from the campaigns. Biden is the one who hasn’t committed to debating, saying in March that “it depends on [Trump’s] behavior.” Biden’s allies, too, have been saying mealy-mouthed things about how outrageous the lack of moderation was in the 2020 debates. These sound an awful lot like excuses from a team that’s concerned about its candidate’s quickness on his feet, in an environment where the majority of Americans—a majority of Biden voters—believe he’s too old to run for a second term. The Trump campaign, meanwhile, called this week for earlier and more frequent debates, and appears willing to have them run through the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization with which it’s gone to war in the past. Maybe everyone will get COVID and cancel them all again?
There’s been a foofaraw among Democrats over the past couple of weeks over the idea that Justice Sonia Sotomayor, 69, should resign from the Supreme Court in time for Senate Democrats to install a younger replacement before the election. This, of course, stems entirely from the trauma of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to retire in 2013–14, when Democrats had their last good chance to replace her, a choice that gave us Trump-appointed conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett and a 6–3 conservative majority. But for all the enthusiasm among liberal pundits for the idea, there’s not much purchase for it among elected Democrats. Sen. Richard Blumenthal was a useful test case. After very mildly suggesting to NBC News that Sotomayor “really has to weigh the competing factors” ahead of the election, the rest of his party—especially in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—was quick to push back. Most Democratic senators are now saying they’re “baffled” by the idea. The Surge isn’t “baffled,” but it also doesn’t think Sotomayor is all too analogous to Ginsburg. Ginsburg was 81 when she refused to retire and had several hundred types of cancer. Sotomayor is 69 and has Type 1 diabetes, a manageable condition, and no cancers that we know of. It would be cool if she stepped down and was replaced with a 35-year-old, but this isn’t quite the crisis that Ginsburg was.
Trump’s Given His Enemies Plenty to Work With on His Worst Issue
10
24
13.04.2024
Hello friends, and welcome to a Surge unlike any other. Well, we guess it’s a lot like the other Surges (perfect).
This week, hoo boy, we’ve got it all. We’ve got Trump. We’ve got abortion. We’ve got Trump and abortion. We’ve got Trump, Kari Lake, abortion, and Arizona. We’ve got a bullet in some guy’s arm. We’ve got questions about the bullet in the arm. We’ve got Lindsey Graham and abortion. What’ve you got, reader? You’ve got some content to read.
That was weird. Anyway …
By Jim Newell
There is a constant to Donald Trump’s actual belief on abortion (or any) policy: He truly doesn’t care. Banned, legal up to a certain number of weeks, mandatory—whatever it is that will get him closer to restoring that Diet Coke button to the Resolute desk, that’s his position. In his first campaign and his presidential term, that meant taking the traditional party line on abortion to prove his bona fides to social conservatives. That effort eventually culminated in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Now that the Dobbs decision and its ever-rolling fallout have turned abortion into Republicans’ top liability this year, though, he’s on defense. In a message this week, Trump said abortion policy should be left to each individual state—i.e., that he wouldn’t campaign on national abortion limits—because “we have to win.” Will this inoculation take? It’s definitely better than campaigning on a national abortion ban. But it won’t at all mitigate Democrats’ plans to spend hundreds of millions, or billions, on the issue. Saying he won’t pursue a legislative abortion ban as president doesn’t address what he or his appointees might push through the executive branch. And he’s on tape over and over again—including the tape where he made this week’s announcement—bragging about how he killed Roe v. Wade through his judicial appointments, which happens to be true. Trump and his orbit have already given Democrats plenty to work with.
Cults are a sweet deal so long as you’re the leader, and one of the beautiful things about being Donald Trump is that he can make decisions like this without fear of blowback from his side. Sure, there’s blowback, but he doesn’t have to fear it. For example, some members of the coalition, like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser and South........
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