Marjorie Taylor Greene, Welcome to the Resistance

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that would like to console President Donald Trump for losing^[2] the Nobel Peace Prize. The Surge has been there, bud. Buck up, put in the offseason work, and you’ll be right there for 2026.

The government has been shut down long enough that we’ve found a way to blame Jeffrey Epstein for it. In the government’s absence (RIP government), we’ve got some elections to talk about. Plus, another indictment of someone the president doesn’t like. Cool?

Let’s start with an old pal.

Democrats’ new Republican best friend.

The Georgia congresswoman whom Democrats spent years portraying as the wild-eyed manifestation of the MAGA fringe is suddenly singing a new tune. Greene has broken with her party and Trump on a number of high-profile occasions this year, calling the situation in Gaza a “genocide^[3]” and criticizing Trump’s bombing of Iran^[4]. In perhaps her most high-profile move, she was one of a few Republicans to sign the House discharge petition^[5] forcing a vote to release all the Epstein files. That, especially, is not going over well^[6] with the White House.

As if the trend-piece sirens weren’t already blaring in newsrooms, Greene made another splash this week when she defended extending expiring Obamacare subsidies, the very issue over which Democrats are waging this shutdown. “When the tax credits expire this year my own adult children’s insurance premiums for 2026 are going to DOUBLE,” she wrote in a long post^[7], “along with all the wonderful families and hard-working people in my district.” She noted that “it is absolutely shameful, disgusting, and traitorous, that our laws and policies screw the American people so much that the government is shut down right now fighting over basic issues like this,” and warned that Republicans had no plan to combat spiking health insurance premiums. Even after Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries made Greene the centerpiece of their talking points^[8], Greene kept going. In a surreal episode, she went on CNN, in person, to trash her party to Wolf Blitzer. “You’re a courageous politician, but more important, a loving mother,” Blitzer told her^[9]. We did not see any of this coming.

A proper October surprise.

Jay Jones is—as of this writing—the Democratic nominee for Virginia attorney general, running against incumbent Republican AG Jason Miyares. Ten or so days ago, Jones, a former state lawmaker, was in strong shape to win the race, as these off-year Virginia elections trend toward the party that doesn’t hold the White House. Last week, though, National Review reported^[10] on texts from 2022 in which Jones made jokes to a fellow state lawmaker about shooting the Republican state speaker, Todd Gilbert, among other sick thoughts. There were quite a few errors in judgment on Jones’ behalf, here. One specific piece of advice, though: If you’re planning a run for statewide office in a couple years but you simply have to send sicko texts, don’t send them to someone from the other party.

With ballots set and early voting underway, there’s no clean way for Jones to bow out of the race now. Polls in the last couple of days have shown him taking a serious hit, perhaps even vaulting Miyares into the lead^[11]. The bigger question is what effect, if any, this has on the top of the ticket. Republicans are trying to tie the Jones scandal to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger, who has denounced^[12] Jones’ comments but stayed short of withdrawing her support. And, more broadly, they’re trying to fit this into the post-Charlie-Kirk-assassination argument that Democrats have a violence problem. It’s clear enough that Jones is in a true fight now for his own race. But as far as the governor’s race, Virginia has bigger things to worry about^[13] in the Trump era than Jay Jones’ texts from 2022.

The revenge indictment tour continues.

On Thursday, New York Attorney General Letitia James was federally indicted for being a political opponent of Donald Trump. Technically, she was indicted^[14] for bank fraud relating to alleged hanky-panky on a mortgage application. But her deciding to rent out a property is not why this happened. Career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, after studying the case and doing interviews for months, found nothing worthwhile. The prosecutor overseeing major criminal cases there found nothing, and might get fired^[15], just like the previous^[16] EDVA U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, was. Ultimately Siebert’s replacement, Florida insurance lawyer Lindsey Halligan, went ahead with the case anyway, because Trump wanted revenge on the person who prosecuted^[17] him for fraud for lying about how rich he was.

It was Halligan, after a similar sequence of ignoring career prosecutors, who secured the indictment of former FBI Director Jim Comey a couple of weeks ago. Comey was arraigned this week and pleaded not guilty, while his lawyer announced that he would seek the case’s dismissal on the grounds of being “vindictive” and “selective.” We don’t know how judges evaluate such things, but YA THINK? The president publicly ordered his attorney general to put Halligan in the job so that she would prosecute people he doesn’t like! Speaking of that: The Wall Street Journal reported^[18] this week that the infamous Trump post addressed to “Pam”^[19] delivering that order was, in fact, supposed to be a direct message.

A new law to ignore.

In 2019, Congress passed and Trump signed into law the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, stating that “each employee of the United States Government … furloughed as a result of a covered lapse in appropriations shall be paid for the period of the lapse in appropriations.” After previous “lapses in appropriations”—shutdowns—Congress would have to pass a law to provide back pay for furloughed employees. GEFTA was implemented to make that back pay automatic upon the reopening of the government.

But Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought, who suffers from delirium tremens if he goes more than a few days without threatening the livelihoods of the federal civil service, isn’t so sure about this “law.” As Axios first reported^[20] this week, Vought sought and received a draft memo^[21] from OMB’s general counsel finding textual wiggle room in the law. The memo concluded that Congress still needs to pass “express language appropriating funds for back pay for furloughed employees, or such payments cannot be made.” The key word in this paragraph, however, is draft memo. While Vought enjoys throwing around a good threat, forgoing backpay for furloughed federal employees isn’t popular^[22] on Capitol Hill, and is something that Cabinet and agency heads looking to maintain workforce morale might object to as well. This didn’t rattle Senate Democrats’ resolve at all. We’ll see if the layoffs^[23] that Vought finally announced on Friday will.

The long-prophesied Jeffrey Epstein angle to the shutdown.

For the second week in a row, Speaker Mike Johnson has kept the House chamber out of town. We get the macrostrategy. The House has passed its bill extending government funding and is trying to keep the pressure on the Senate to pass it. Reconvening would be a form of negotiation in and of itself, and they don’t feel that’s necessary.

But there’s another theory about why Johnson is keeping the members away and, like all theories, it involves Jeffrey Epstein. Once the House is back in session, Johnson will swear in Democratic Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva, who won a special election on Sept. 23 to fill her late father’s Arizona seat. And as soon as Grijalva is sworn in, she’s going to sign the shit out of the Epstein files discharge petition^[28], giving it the necessary 218 signatures to force a vote. Keeping the House away, then, gives the White House and Republican leadership more time to pressure Greene and three other Republicans to withdraw their signatures from the petition. Johnson says that his actions in keeping the House away, and refusing to swear in Grijalva until the House is back, have “nothing to do” with Epstein. But … it kind of seems like they have a little bit to do with Epstein, right? Maybe more than a little bit, no?

Virality cuts both ways.

The former Orange County Democratic congresswoman, who’s running for governor of California, built her reputation among progressive activists with viral videos of herself using a whiteboard^[29] during congressional hearings. This week, she went viral for all the wrong reasons^[30]. First, she threatened to walk out of an interview because she didn’t find the reporter’s questions and follow-ups “pleasant” enough of an experience. It’s an agonizing watch.^[31] Shortly thereafter—once the knives were out—Politico posted^[32] a 2021 video of her berating a staffer to “get out of my fucking shot!” during a recorded video conversation with the energy secretary. Porter had a reputation^[33] during her time in Congress for this sort of behavior toward her staff^[34]. Surely there’s more to come.

The Surge never quite got it with Porter, perhaps because committee-room prop gimmicks aren’t really our thing. She had a solid win in 2018, flipping a red district (that was trending leftward fast as the Democratic Party became more suburban and upscale). But she underperformed^[35] in subsequent reelections in 2020 and 2022, and then burned a mountain of cash to come in a distant third place^[36] in the California Senate race in 2024. After that experience, she whined^[37] about how the contest was rigged. Don’t love it, never did! Anyway, there goes our chance to score an interview with her (that she would walk out of).

Coming soon to Texas: More ad spending.

The GOP Senate primary in Texas is getting “Texas-sized”—i.e., increasing from two to three major candidates. State Attorney General Ken Paxton, the MAGA survivor of an impeachment attempt^[38] and federal^[39] and state^[40] criminal investigations, had announced a primary challenge to Sen. John Cornyn, who has a couple of times expressed displeasure with Trump and worked on bipartisan gun control legislation^[41]. Cornyn was in a deep hole in polling at first, but had tightened the gap by September after outside groups spent $20 million propping him up.

Well, good news: Now everyone gets to spend more! Rep. Wesley Hunt, a two-term member from Houston, joined the race this week. He’s presenting himself as an above-the-fray option who’s MAGA, but without Paxton’s baggage. What this means in practicality is that now Cornyn’s establishment allies will have to dump a lot of money into a three-way race to carry Cornyn through a likely runoff. That frustration was evident in Monday’s statements from Cornyn’s allies. “Now that Wesley has chosen personal ambition over holding President Trump’s House Majority there will be a full vetting of his record,” the National Republican Senatorial Committee said. “It’s unfortunate that Wesley Hunt has decided to abandon President Trump’s efforts to protect the House majority and instead pursue his personal ambitions,” the Senate Leadership Fund, the main Senate GOP super PAC, said. As you can tell by these statements, and as you already know having been awake for the last decade, Trump’s endorsement will be crucial in this primary.^[42][43][44]