Why Trump Has Gone to War With the Freedom Caucus’ MAGA Chairman
Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter whose 150 meals a year at Morton’s the Steakhouse suddenly look like child’s play.
Speaking of child’s play, we’ve got an actual child in the Surge this week. Also, the antithesis of a child, in Joe Biden. And the rapper 50 Cent!! It’s almost like it’s summer. Plus: Another update from the United Kingdom, a land of horrors.
Let’s begin, though, with a sneaky good primary in Virginia, featuring all of the Surge’s favorite friends.
1. Bob Good
An intra-MAGA civil war in Virginia (just like the real Civil War!).
The Virginia primary for Rep. Bob Good, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, is fast becoming one of the most delightful of the cycle. If you’ll recall from last week’s edition, Trump had endorsed Good’s opponent, John McGuire, likely in retaliation for Good’s endorsement of Ron DeSantis (and leaked private criticism of Trump) in the presidential primary. But this has expanded beyond a one-on-one feud between Good and Trump. A host of Freedom Caucus(–adjacent) members and typical Trump ride-or-dies, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, have endorsed and are campaigning for Good. Trump, meanwhile, has sent Good’s campaign a cease-and-desist letter instructing it to stop giving out yard signs that suggest that Good has Trump’s backing. Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has endorsed McGuire, released a video this week standing next to one of the (indeed, very deceiving) yard signs on the side of a road. Trump, in a video of his own this week, reiterated his support for McGuire, saying that Good “will stab you in the back like he did me.” The primary is June 18. Let’s hope that it continues to get uglier until then, for the purposes of having fun on the internet.
2. Joe Biden
A marginal polling improvement? A marginal polling improvement!
Last week, we wrote about how no one could immediately predict how the Trump guilty verdict in New York would affect the election given the unprecedented nature of the situation, and that anyone who made a confident prediction was a liar who should go to jail. (More on jail later.) But now seven days have passed, and the Surge is officially lifting the embargo on gabbin’ about polls. Several surveys showed Biden picking up a point or two on Trump in the week after the verdict. New York Times polling freak Nate Cohn, after poring through raw strands of code, gave “an equivocal ‘yes’ ”—mmm, sweet, sweet equivocation—to the question of whether the verdict had changed anyone’s mind. In a New York Times/Siena College poll, which reinterviewed those who had previously taken the poll, Trump’s margin of support over Biden dipped from 3 points to 1. That’s not an especially handsome difference, but there was a good sign for Biden under the hood. Among those most likely to shift were “young, nonwhite and disengaged Democratic-leaning voters,” whose soft support for Biden relative to 2020 has been a major factor in Trump’s polling leads this year. This is not to say that the conviction particularly stunned these voters into thinking that Trump may not be such a swell guy after all, but the news coverage may have jolted them a bit from disengagement to engagement. That this will happen more and more down the stretch is, essentially, the Biden team’s theory of the campaign. So it may be not that the verdict itself changes the trajectory of the election on its own, but that it’s the first in a series of events over the next five months that could provide the Holy shit, Trump could be president again! moments the Biden campaign needs.
3. Guy Rose
Kidz Surge.
The hottest new celebrity in Washington this week was 6-year-old Guy Rose, the son of Tennessee Rep. John Rose. (We believe that this makes Rose the youngest-ever entrant on the Surge, perhaps with the exception of one of Biden’s psychotic dogs.) On Monday, while the elder Rose was delivering a House floor speech lambasting the criminal conviction of Donald Trump, his son was seated behind him, making silly faces for the camera. Guy Rose then went on something of a press tour after getting some “media training” from a Rose staffer. He told the Washington Post that his father’s speech had been “so boring” and Fox News that it was “boring stuff.” He also tried to explain that his gestures had been intended to spell the letters S-A-M as a message to his younger brother and to make him laugh. The paparazzi also caught him rolling around on the White House lawn during the annual congressional picnic on Tuesday. He did an interview with the Wall Street Journal. He was, within a couple of days, significantly more famous than his father.
4. 50 Cent
A newsworthy visit to the Capitol.
50 Cent was at the Capitol this week! You will know this if you follow any congressional reporter, because they all got their pictures taken with the rapper. Mr. Cent was there to take meetings with both Democrats and Republicans to talk about growing Black entrepreneurship in the spirits industry—but also to tweet a ton of pictures with lawmakers, including Speaker Mike Johnson, Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi. His thirstiest post, though, was with Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert, who, he wrote, was “making the white house look good,” with a smirking emoji. He later followed that up with another post, which we will simply copy-paste: “Wait, wait, guys, i took pictures with everyone and all you seem to care about is Lauren … what she do in a dark theater that hasn’t been done, my God ! Hey I don’t have chlamydia by the way. LOL.” Just name the week, 50 Cent, and you’re guest-writing the Surge. He also made some headlines, telling a CBS News reporter that he sees Black men “identifying with Trump” in the upcoming election “because they got RICO charges.” Dum dee dum, next entry …
5. Ronny Jackson and Scott Perry
Hmm? You’re on what committee, now?
Speaker Mike Johnson made an eye-popping personnel decision this week, when he appointed Reps. Scott Perry, a former Freedom Caucus chairman whose phone was seized by the FBI in 2022, and Ronny Jackson, a former White House doctor with a colorful history in that position and the sort of person who has a “2023 Texas rodeo incident” section on his Wikipedia page, to the House Intelligence Committee. Further, Johnson didn’t tip off the committee chair, Rep. Michael Turner, about his decisions before he announced them, and he skipped over other, more normal-brained members for the appointment. Appointing two members not particularly known for their levelheadedness to a committee charged with serious work has not gone over well on either the Republican or Democratic side of the aisle. So why did Johnson do it? For the same reason any House Republican does anything: “because Trump wanted him to,” as Punchbowl News reported. But that’s probably it, right? Trump’s a modest guy. He doesn’t like to ask for too many favors from the people he controls.
6. Steve Bannon
A surprise summer vacation! (To jail.)
Steve Bannon, the former Trump White House aide turned Trump enemy turned Trump friend and MAGA media maven, got some poor news this week: He might have to go to jail after all. Just a tough break. Bannon had been convicted of contempt of Congress in 2022 for his refusal to cooperate with the House Jan. 6 committee and was sentenced to four months in jail. The judge had paused his sentence while Bannon appealed, however, giving him more time to spend in the podcast booth. This week, though, the same federal judge determined that Bannon would have to report to jail by July 1 after a circuit court rejected Bannon’s arguments. Bannon vowed to keep fighting his sentence, to take it “all the way to the Supreme Court if we have to.” Well, we hope he has a nice time with that. But he should really just go now so he can be back in action just in time for the closing month of the election! Think of all the #content he would miss if he didn’t leave jail until the beginning of November.
7. Rishi Sunak
Another update from His Majesty’s Surge.
For the second time in three weeks, His Majesty’s Surge—that cheeky bugger—has artfully dodged its way into this edition. As we know, the Tories, after being in power for 14 years, are a few short weeks away from losing by 1 million points in the July 4 general election. Among their problems is a complete and unbreakable disdain among the British public for everything they do. And this week, they fucked up a photo op. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak left the international celebration of the 80th anniversary of D-Day early to return home and film a television interview. That left the U.K. government’s foreign secretary, the right honorable Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, to stand in for him in photos with fellow world leaders Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Volodymyr Zelensky, and Olaf Scholz. Sunak’s premature departure irritated everyone in Britain and earned him the reprimand, from a 98-year-old D-Day veteran, that Sunak had let the country down. That’s very poor press a few weeks ahead of a general election. Sunak apologized and added, “It’s important, though, given the enormity of the sacrifice made, that we don’t politicize this.” Do not make political hay out of the political leader’s mistake—unless you hate the troops.