Who Showed Up to Lead in a Dark, Tense Week?

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge. Here we are again! Wish we weren’t.

This was an awful week. The jokes begin in the third entry, if you want to skip ahead, and they cover the very funny subject matter of the president’s relationship with a deceased sex criminal. Then the gags really get going when we talk about the tensest state of affairs between Russia and NATO since the Cold War. Can’t get enough? How about a conflict of interest at the Federal Reserve? Finally, everyone’s comfort food: relitigating Democrats’ calamitous performance in the 2024 election.

Thank you all for reading.

A national horror.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus Wednesday was a national shock to the system we hope the nation doesn’t experience again. Kirk was the father of two very young children. Even with all the snuff footage that social media algorithms were autoplaying for us Wednesday afternoon, it was the photos of his family that we found most difficult to look at.

We’re not going to attempt an obituary of Kirk here. We didn’t know him, and it’s not our place. But the country feels much more dangerously heated than it did on Wednesday morning, and it wasn’t exactly Disneyland then. In that vein, there are two people we’d call attention to as proper leaders during a week when leadership was needed. The first is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who knows that a lot of disaffected young people look up to him, and released^[2] a note-perfect video against creeping political violence on Thursday. It’s simple and powerful, and it comes from someone who understands how much worse things can get. The second is Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a sober-minded leader^[3] long concerned about growing division, who recognizes that the last thing anyone needs right now is the temperature being dialed up any further. Thank God this was under his jurisdiction. And rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.

What’s the endgame?

The next government funding deadline hits on Sept. 30, and there’s a lot of pressure from the Democratic base for legislators to put up more of a fight than they did during the last round of this in March. Their problem in the spring was largely a failure to manage expectations. Democrats—who have some say in this in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to break a filibuster—promised and promised that they wouldn’t just roll over but were never in a position to secure anything meaningful. So the abrupt rolling-over didn’t land well.

Six months later, we once again see a lot of talk from Democrats, but not an improved position. Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the respective Democratic leaders in the Senate and House, are demanding health care concessions—like an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies^[4]—in exchange for their votes. It’s a worthy goal and an issue on which there’s split opinion in the GOP. But it’s not the sort of big policy you typically see attached to a seven-week continuing resolution^[5] that punts the bigger funding fight into November. And it’s also not what those members of the base urging Democrats to take a stand against Donald Trump’s abuses of power are talking about.

(Ugh, three paragraphs!) So let’s say Republicans don’t budge, which they’re not inclined to.^[6] Let’s say House Republicans, then, are able to pass a funding extension into November without Democratic votes. What do Senate Democrats do in that moment? A small number of them could join Republicans to keep the government open. Or Democrats could all link arms and shut down the government for a few days of protest before reopening it. Or Democrats could all link arms and shut down the government indefinitely, the endgame for which is Republicans gutting the legislative filibuster.^[7] Choose wisely.

Signature? Me? Nuh-uh.

Way back when—in the early part of this week, when life was still a barrel of laughs—the House Oversight Committee released pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s 50^th “birthday book” that it had received from the Epstein estate. Therein, amidst a bunch of other pervy stuff, lay the Trump page that the Wall Street Journal first reported on months^[8] ago—which the president, who vehemently denied everything in the article, sued the publication for.^[9] It appears exactly as the WSJ reported^[10] it: “It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”

We’re so old we remember when this used to be called “getting caught red-handed” and the comms team would have to scramble to explain why they had denied it in the first place. Instead, the comms team continued to deny that Trump ever wrote this and argued that the signature looked nothing like his. (It did! Very much! Exactly like it!) Congressional Republicans either used that line or said they hadn’t seen the image. This might be the most clear-cut denial of reality we’ve seen in at least … eh, a couple of weeks? Anyway, the Epstein story isn’t going away.^{[11][12][13][14]}

An update from the front (Poland??).

Oh, here’s some more great news:^[15] NATO had to shoot down enemy targets over allied airspace for the first time ever. Enough, enough, we’re done! Who’s a newsletter got to bribe to get citizenship in Tahiti? Do you have to “join France” first?

Anyway. This entry is about war in Europe. Russia sent more^[16] than a dozen drones from Belarus into Polish airspace, some quite deep into Poland, prompting NATO to scramble jets and take them down. Russia and Belarus claimed that it was all a big misunderstanding—these drones are supposed to do war in Ukraine, but sometimes they get wonky and have a mind of their own, you know how it is—but of course it wasn’t. It was a provocation^[17] to test NATO’s response and organization as Vladimir Putin eyes Polish supply lines into Ukraine. Perhaps the most important thing to monitor, too, would be the reaction of the traditional anchor of NATO—the U.S. president—and whether an incursion into an allied member state actually bothers him. Here was the official reaction^[18] of that U.S. president on Wednesday morning: “What’s with Russia violating Poland’s airspace with drones? Here we go!” Yeah, what’s that all about? And one more thing, Vladimir: Why can’t you just order a regular cup of coffee anywhere these days?

Maybe time for a new FBI director?

We’re just saying that a major objection to Patel’s nomination as FBI director, along with his background as an explicit MAGA partisan with revenge on the mind,^[19] was whether he was the most qualified of candidates to lead a sprawling national law enforcement agency. So let’s look at his record this week. At 6:21 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Patel posted^[20] that “the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody.” At 7:59, he posted^[21] that that subject “has been released after an interrogation by law enforcement.” These pronouncements conflicted with what Utah state officials^[22] were saying at the very same time. It was embarrassing, and had the look of someone under a lot of pressure^[23] getting ahead of himself during a very fluid situation.

“This is what happens when you let good cops be cops,” Patel, having finally gotten out of the good cops’ way, said Friday morning following the suspect’s apprehension. (He added other flourishes, too, such as saying of Kirk, “I’ll see you in Valhalla.” We need a complete and total shutdown of the internet.) So, what do you all think? New FBI director time? Many people^[24] are saying.

Just a thought ahead of another high-stakes confirmation …

Last week, some Republican senators showed regret over confirming RFK Jr^[25]. This week, Kash Patel live-tweeted his criminal investigation. Next week, there’s another nominee coming to the Senate floor who’s expected to sail through despite a clear and glaring conflict of interest.

Stephen Miran is chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, and Trump has nominated him to fill a temporary vacancy on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors until the end of January. (That vacancy stems from ex-Governor Adriana Kugler’s abrupt and still unexplained resignation^[26] in August.) But instead of resigning^[27] his White House job, Miran is instead taking an unpaid leave of absence from it. In other words, he might feel compelled to heed the president’s demands on interest rates if he wants to keep his White House job—and golly, this might be something that President Trump has thought about, too. Nevertheless, this all seemed copacetic to GOP members of the Senate Banking Committee, who advanced his nomination this week.^[28] He should be confirmed in time for the Fed’s interest-rate meeting next week. This might not change much practically in the short term; the Fed is already poised to cut rates at this meeting. But it’s another crack in the Fed’s independence, something GOP senators proclaim to be upset about—though gosh, not a vote-against-y of level upset. Maybe next time!

The Surge Book Club has reconvened.

Finally, the end; it’s ciggy-and-book time. The first excerpt^[33] from former Vice President Kamala Harris’ upcoming book, 107 Days, was published in the Atlantic this week, and there were actually a few interesting lines that weren’t lawyered and calculated into emptiness. For example, she writes that her “mantra” about whether Biden should run again—“It’s Joe and Jill’s decision”—was “recklessness” in retrospect. “This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition.” She also takes her swipes at Biden’s aides who felt that her success as Vice President would come at Biden’s expense.

The excerpt prompted typically anonymous swipes in return from “former Biden White House officials” about how Harris “was simply not good at the job,” “had basically zero substantive role in any of the administration’s key work streams,” and was a lousy presidential candidate in both 2019 and 2024. Now, let’s suppose all that’s true, that she was both a terrible politician and a terrible vice president. Who put her on the 2020 presidential ticket? Who immediately endorsed Harris for the 2024 nomination after leaving the race? Would following this argument to its logical conclusion land Biden’s team in a flattering light?^[34]