Welcome to this weekend’s edition of the Surge, a wartime newsletter that would be honored to ration its word supply for the benefit of the Patriotic War against Denmark and the tyrant King Frederik.
We now have less than 10 days before society reenters the Trump news accelerant for another four-year spell. Be sure to get all of your affairs in order. Even before Trump enters office, though, we’re already going toe-to-toe with the Canadians (RIP Justin Trudeau), Mexicans, Panamanians, and Danes. Senate Democrats are running so scared on immigration that they might vote to deport themselves. Congressional Republicans have a big legislative agenda to move, but they’re stuck on the first part of Step 1.
Let’s begin in Southern California.
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Los Angeles County was overrun this week with several uncontrollable fires torching thousands of structures and wiping out entire neighborhoods, as hurricane-force Santa Ana winds spread embers across the landscape of bone-dry chaparral. If you were to examine a common recurring nightmare in the heads of public executives, it would probably be that there’s a catastrophic natural disaster at home … and they’re out of the country on non-pressing business. That nightmare came true for Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass this week, as the fires broke out while she was part of an official U.S. delegation to Ghana. We are unsure, from afar, what level of blame to ascribe to her. You can never predict which fire warning is going to be the one that converts into the Worst Fire Disaster in History, and she flew back Tuesday. And the Los Angeles government has gotten a lot of criticism for cuts to the fire budget, but that’s a far more complicated story (and the bigger problem would be water management). But if we lived in Los Angeles and our house and neighborhood burned down? And we saw that the mayor hadn’t even been in the city? To do something that wasn’t vital? Obviously, we’d dedicate our lives to making sure she never held public office again. And we’re wondering how many more Angelenos are feeling that about basically all their elected officials.
The president-elect this week announced that he could not rule out the use of military force or economic coercion to achieve his goal of acquiring Greenland. The Democratic response to this and other objectives Trump has recently listed—like similarly conquering Canada or the Panama Canal, or renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America—has been that it’s all an attempt to distract from his unfulfillable campaign pledge to lower prices or his agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy. Good for the Democrats. But we absolutely believe that Trump is planning to slap tariffs on Denmark unless it makes Greenland available for purchase, and that this is a high priority for him. As we wrote semi-jokingly in a separate piece this week, Trump isn’t wrong that Greenland has real strategic value—but he’s interested in seizing it mostly because it looks really big on maps that distort its size. Thank you to Slate’s Fred Kaplan, then, for reading Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s book The Divider, which confirms that this is the case. In a very Trumplike anecdote, Trump was riveted when a friend, cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder, pointed out an oversize Greenland on a map. In any event, Trump this week dispatched his eldest son and his podcast friends to the island in a staged demonstration of how much Greenland loves MAGA, and the Danish king changed his royal coat of arms to emphasize Greenland’s importance to the kingdom. Greenland, meanwhile, wants to be completely independent.
Now that he’s duly elected as speaker, all Mike Johnson has to do is figure out how to pass the president-elect’s legislative agenda through his painfully narrow majority of world-historical misfits working at cross-purposes. The process Republicans will use to pass their partisan wish list on border security, energy, and cutting spending and taxes is called reconciliation, and it allows the party to circumvent the 60-vote Senate filibuster under certain conditions. The question presently before Republicans is whether to try to lump everything on that list into one bill or two. The plan promoted weeks ago by Senate Majority Leader John Thune was to break the agenda into two: to give Trump a quick win on border and energy provisions, then to slog through the tedious work of renewing and expanding the Trump tax cuts of 2017. This strategy, though, has its trade-offs. The big one: Have you seen the House Republican majority anytime recently? You expect that group to pass two big bills on a party-line basis? Trump, after consulting his own legislative aesthetics, recommended earlier in the week that the majority pass “one big, beautiful bill” but that he’s open to two. While there’s no definitive answer yet, the current thinking seems to be: The House needs to figure out what can pass the House, and it’ll work from there. What we can say for sure is that this is going to get messy in ways that are difficult to currently comprehend.
We get where Senate Democrats are coming from. The party got roasted on immigration in the recent election and is trying—especially for the sake of its most vulnerable members—to pivot more toward the less permissive approach currently favored by the American public. That doesn’t, however, mean that they need to throw all critical thinking on the subject out the window. Right now, a bill called the Laken Riley Act, which flew through the House last week, is on the move in the Senate, with 84 Senate Democrats agreeing to debate and amend the bill. We forget who coined it, but to paraphrase a saying: If a bill is named after the victim of a horrible tragedy, watch out. The bill would require that any immigrant lacking permanent legal status who is arrested or charged with theft, including shoplifting, be detained by the authorities without bond. And so, right off the bat, there’s a substantial due process issue. Immigrants with permanent legal status would be caught up too. The bill would cede much of the federal government’s power over individual immigration decisions to state attorneys general, and it would allow courts to prevent the State Department from issuing visas to countries that don’t accept deportations of their nationals. That list includes India. Democrats hope that they can amend the bill to make it more reasonable. Even if they don’t, though, there may still be 60 votes for it in the Senate as is. This may not be an easy bill, especially given its title, for Democrats to reject after the recent election. But they may regret showing their newfound moderation by supporting a bill that puts much of the feds’ immigration policy into the hands of the attorney general of Texas.
The Pennsylvania senator is one of two Democratic co-sponsors of the bill, along with new Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego, and he’s been outspoken in his support, appearing on conservative media networks promoting the legislation. And this week, John Fetterman accepted an invitation to visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago, becoming the first Senate Democrat to do so. “I’ve been clear that no one is my gatekeeper,” he said in a statement. “I will meet with and have a conversation with anyone if it helps me deliver for Pennsylvania and the nation.” Fetterman long ago abandoned staying in the good graces of progressives and has leaned further into using them as a foil since the election. Fetterman, to us, isn’t on the verge of switching parties or anything and is doing what he thinks is best to arrest the free fall of the Democratic brand. And that, for him, means pairing the cultural populism of not sweating the details on restrictive immigration bills with the economic populism that’s much easier for Democrats to throw around.
We’re about a week out from TikTok being banned from app stores in the United States, and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, simply can’t just take the L and act in the fiduciary interests of its shareholders. Instead, it went to the Supreme Court to whine some more about how the 2024 law giving ByteDance a chance to either sell TikTok or lose the U.S. marketplace is unconstitutional. But SCOTUS justices at Friday’s oral arguments seemed mostly inclined to uphold the law. We’ll see how the court ultimately rules, but ByteDance’s behavior since this law was passed has been indicative of why it passed on an overwhelming bipartisan basis. The company could have made a killing for its investors if it had ordered a sale. Instead, it would rather just light money on fire, because maybe money isn’t its only purpose after all. Relax, TikTok users. If TikTok withers on the vine, new domestic apps that profit off brain melt and the destruction of youth literacy will arise in its place, until we can ban all of those too.
Joe Biden gave his first and only exit interview with a print publication this week. When asked by USA Today whether he could have won in November had he not pulled out of the race, he said, “It’s presumptuous to say that, but I think yes,” mentioning something about polling he had reviewed. It is presumptuous to say that, because he could not have won. His administration was viewed as a disaster, and he cannot speak coherently. But it’s a nice way of throwing his vice president, who stepped into a dire situation to save the Democratic Party about four Senate seats and dozens of House seats, under the bus. Biden added that he didn’t know if he could’ve served another four years anyway. “And then when Trump was running again for reelection, I really thought I had the best chance of beating him,” he said. “But I also wasn’t looking to be president when I was 85 years old, 86 years old.” We have no recollection of Biden, from the campaign, saying that he was looking to serve only another couple of years before resigning. If you don’t say that, then voters are in fact going to assume that they’re electing you to serve another four years. What an unholy mess. Enjoy the NFL playoffs!
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