Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which does not know whether the government will be open or shut down when you read this newsletter. It will be an early Christmas surprise!
We weren’t sure midweek which direction this newsletter might take—then the House of Representatives exploded while trying to fund the government. This is essentially a Surge snuff film, and we focus most of our attention on it. Elsewhere: Trump is suing a pollster for doing a bad poll. And Matt Gaetz may counter the release of his dirty laundry by releasing everyone else’s, to which we say: neat!
Let’s begin with something less neat.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Greens87/Getty Images Plus and Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images.
1. Elon Musk
How about a law banning him from keyboard use?
The world’s richest person has the ear of the incoming president and owns the preeminent social media platform for sharing instant news developments and reactions. And while he has very strong opinions, he has no idea what he’s talking about. We already saw, during the election, the way he could funnel misinformation to the fore. This week, we got a taste of what he could do in times of governance. The House released a negotiated short-term government funding bill this week, and a number of year-end priorities on health care, agriculture, and other miscellany were tacked on. This was not the sort of ground-out compromise that House Republicans would be inclined to love, but enough of them might have swallowed it. Through a tweet storm that was at best an exercise in fundamentally misunderstanding the legislative process, however, Elon Musk helped kill the bill in an afternoon’s work. He posted incorrectly, or amplified incorrect posts, that the bill would increase lawmakers’ salaries by 40 percent, that taxpayers would be paying for a new D.C. football stadium, that it would fund new “bioweapons labs,” and that it would “block” an investigation into the Jan. 6 committee. This is going to be the process going forward: Musk wants something done—or not done—in Congress and uses his social media company to melt the phone lines at Capitol Hill offices. It’s a discouraging dynamic for healthy public discourse about what Congress is and isn’t trying to do. And the only way out of it is for people to realize, probably the hard way, that the oligarch playing house in Mar-a-Lago isn’t a reliable narrator.
2. Donald Trump
Raise your own debt ceiling, pal.
After Musk had successfully whipped Republicans into a frenzy with posts about how an end-of-year funding package was the devil’s work, Donald Trump stepped in to dictate the next steps. He called for Congress to pass a funding extension stripped of all the wins Democrats had secured, as well as to increase the debt ceiling now instead of the middle of next year, when it’s expected to be reached. Democrats, appropriately, treated this as laughable, and that version of a funding bill went down hard on Thursday evening. Allow us to explain what Trump was asking for with the debt-ceiling demand. Increasing the debt ceiling is a difficult political pill to swallow, and the onus is on the governing party to do it. Trump was trying to get it off his plate before he takes office, and to suspend the debt ceiling until 2027. In 2027 there’s a very good chance House Democrats will be in the majority again, and Trump would be asking them to do the heavy lifting on the debt ceiling to cover the debt accrued during the previous two years of unified Republican control. We do think that if House Republicans had offered to wipe out the debt ceiling altogether—forever eliminating this threat of Republican hostage-taking that they wield against Democratic presidents—then Democrats should’ve leapt at the opportunity. Short of that, Trump and the incoming Republican majorities in Congress can wash their own dirty dishes.
3. Chip Roy
Setting up the first exciting primary of 2026.
Trump didn’t just encourage Republicans to raise the debt ceiling now. He threatened primary challenges against any Republicans who “would be so stupid” as to vote against such a plan. Even with that threat, though, 38 Republicans joined nearly all Democrats in rejecting Trump’s preferred package Thursday night, many of them troublemakers in the House Freedom Caucus. In the most gripping moment of floor debate before the vote, Texas Rep. Chip Roy inveighed against House Republicans who would vote to increase the debt ceiling, saying they didn’t have “an ounce of self-respect” and that he was “absolutely sickened by a party that campaigns on fiscal responsibility and has the temerity to go forward to the American people and say you think this is fiscally responsible.” In doing so, Roy made himself the face of the 38 Republicans who voted against Trump’s wishes. Trump noticed. “Weak and ineffective people like Chip have to be dismissed as being utterly unknowledgeable as to the ways of politics,” Trump posted, “and as to Making America Great Again.” Trump and Roy have a bit of a history, as Roy also torched those House Republicans in January 2021 who objected to certifying election results. A Trump-backed primary against Roy, for taking a stand here or there, might be a certainty at this point.
4. Mike Johnson
Why do this?
We don’t think the House speaker handled this funding saga that nimbly. Lawmakers generally don’t like being handed 1,500-page multisubject compromise bills a day before a vote, and House Republicans really don’t like it. But now, as House Republicans consider ousting another speaker, we have to ask, again: To what end? Let’s describe the problem that John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Johnson have all run into, one that a would-be Johnson successor would run into as well. Hard-line Republicans refuse to go along with any reasonable Republican spending package. To get to 218 votes, then, the speaker has to turn to Democrats for votes. The package is thus worsened from a Republican perspective, and the speaker is deemed a sellout traitor and secret Democrat. We cannot truly understand how unmanageable House Republicans will be for the first few months of next year, when they will not be able to lose a single vote if they want to pass party-line legislation. Is Johnson certain he wants to do this? Is anyone? Is having a driver and security detail really worth the ulcers and soaring blood pressure?
5. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Take a breath.
Shocking news from the front this week: A nuanced situation became immediately polarized to a frustrating degree. In this case, the battleground was on the House Oversight Committee (the one where all the people insult each other for the cameras over partisan investigations). The competition to be the top Democrat on the committee was between New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly. Both were perfectly fine options. AOC, the closest House Democrats have to a national celebrity, is a gifted communicator who, despite her early reputation as a left-wing crusader, has earned the broad respect of her Democratic colleagues over the years as she’s learned to become more of an inside player. Connolly, despite undergoing cancer treatment, is a more moderate firebrand who knows an exceptional amount about the federal government and the investigation of misdeeds. Of course, this choice between two reasonable options became a headline-dominating battle between young and old, progressives and centrists, the revolutionaries versus Nancy Pelosi, and life and death. Connolly ended up winning the caucus vote, 131 to 84, showing that even though House Democrats have been willing to challenge the seniority system in other committee races in the past month, they’re not willing to scrap it entirely—and Connolly had already been skipped over for the job once. AOC, to the extent she’s still interested in staying in politics, will get her promotion in due course.
6. Ann Selzer
We’re suing anyone who doesn’t read this entry.
There are certain things about the MAGA mindset that the Surge cannot and will never quite understand. Its rage over the final Des Moines Register poll of Iowa the weekend before the election is one of them. In that survey, the results from longtime Iowa-based pollster Ann Selzer, who had a stellar track record, showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading Trump by 3 points in the state. The poll was obviously an outlier upon release and proved to be so when Trump ended up winning Iowa by 13. Outliers, even from the best, happen. The appropriate response from Republicans after the election should have been to point and laugh at Selzer and all the libs who got unrealistically excited by it. MAGA doesn’t think this way, though. It sees a legacy media–sponsored poll as a weapon of the left, part of its agenda to shape a narrative and suppress Republican turnout. That’s weird. The thing that kept pollsters up at night this cycle was fears that they had underestimated Trump again—not that they weren’t doing enough to help Democrats, somehow, by giving them a false presentation of the electorate. We can only imagine how nauseated Selzer was when she first saw these numbers, knowing that it would tarnish her reputation. But Trump and MAGA allies are so convinced that Selzer was acting out of malevolence that the president-elect sued the Des Moines Register and its parent company, Gannett, this week over publication of the poll, citing “fraud and election interference.” This is, at best, frivolous. But if Gannett goes the way of Disney and settles this, the frivolity will only deepen.
7. Matt Gaetz
Revenge and counterrevenge, forever.
For a normal member of the House of Representatives, resigning from Congress and withdrawing their name for a Senate-confirmed appointment would mean the permanent burial of an Ethics Committee report looking into their alleged sex-and-drugs stuff. But during his time in Congress, ex-Rep. Matt Gaetz went to work each day on a mission to make enemies of his colleagues, one by one. We learned this week that the committee had voted secretly—oh ho ho!—for the report “to be made public after the House’s final day of votes this year,” as CNN reported. Gaetz, trying to get ahead of the release, conceded on social media that his “30’s were an era of working very hard—and playing hard too,” but chastised the committee for releasing a report “that I have no opportunity to debate or rebut as a former member of the body.” That doesn’t mean Gaetz isn’t considering an alternative sort of revenge. He posted this week that he was considering getting sworn in on Jan. 3 for the term he won in November, forcing the release of confidential sexual-harassment settlements made by members over the years, then resigning again in time to host his new television show on Jan. 6. But he may not even need to get sworn in again: There may be members who are planning to do this already. You think the next four years are going to be long? Buddy, the first four hours of the next Congress are going to take a millennium.
