Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, and don’t feel bad for the inauguration pilgrims who traveled to D.C. for the now-indoors inauguration. If they get stuck outside in the cold, they have plenty of experience breaking into the Capitol.
Donald Trump will be sworn in as president on Monday, ushering in a second four-year era of Night Work for Reporters. TV host Pete Hegseth has approximately one week to go on the bender of his life before he has to run the United States military. He should take Senate Democrats with him; they could use a drink.
So yeah, Trump!
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Our big, beautiful boy is about to become a man for the second time, and life has never been so good. Trump heads into his Monday inauguration with the entirety of both the Republican Party and the business world fawning over him in a way they didn’t when he was first inaugurated in 2017. Democrats in Congress have substituted the #Resistance for the #RelativeCooperation. The many confirmation hearings this week for his nominees, controversial or not, went without serious incident that would call into question their viability. Trump and his envoys played a major role in working with the Biden administration to achieve an elusive ceasefire in Gaza this week. He was going to be chilly at the outdoors inauguration—the setup for which a lot of resources had been devoted to—so he got them to move it indoors. Once that’s done, he’s going to be firing off executive orders at a rapid clip. The Resolute Desk Diet Coke Button will be reinstalled. Plus: He doesn’t have to go to jail! If that’s not a plus, what is? The Surge, for its part, will likely go to jail in the first 100 days. In the spirit of drawing a prime corner cell, we wish Trump all the best! We shall see you next week, reader, red-eyed and exhausted, in the new era.
The most closely watched of the many confirmation hearings this week was Tuesday’s in the Senate Armed Services Committee. There, veteran and nonprofit director turned television host Pete Hegseth, the least qualified and most personal scandal–tinged defense secretary nominee going back a very long time, faced one round of questioning from Democratic senators and compliments from Republican senators. Democrats, in their cross-examination, pursued his knowledge and qualifications for the job, his abrupt change of heart about women in combat roles, and the allegations about his drinking and womanizing. But Hegseth was a smooth talker, blaming all of the negative coverage of his nomination on left-wing media smears and regularly attesting to how Jesus and his current wife had changed him. The performance appears to have been good enough for the many Republican senators looking for any excuse to avoid voting down one of Trump’s key nominees. Barring a shock, he should be confirmed next week. And—to use the official Surge mantra for the next four years—we’ll just see how it goes!
The inauguration of the Surge’s president—the TikTok ban—is supposed to come on Sunday. Alas, the decisionmakers in Washington are losing their nerve in an embarrassing show of defeat to the brain-rot app. If you’ll recall, a bill last year forcing TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell off the app or face a ban was rolled into a major foreign aid package, which flew through Congress and was signed by the president. The deadline for the sale comes Jan. 19, unless there’s a transaction already in the works. But there’s no transaction in the works, and the Supreme Court on Friday easily upheld the constitutionality of the ban. In other words: We should be done here. But supporters of the bill swore up and down last year that this would never become a “ban” because ByteDance would obviously sell. ByteDance stared it down, though, and bet that U.S. policymakers would get weak-kneed if the ban were actually about to go into effect. The company appears to have been right. President Joe Biden reportedly won’t enforce the ban in his last hours in office, leaving the app’s future to the Trump administration, while Democrats in Congress are running around like maniacs trying to delay the ban. Trump, meanwhile, loves TikTok now because a billionaire owning a huge stake in ByteDance donated heavily to his political operation, and because people told him that TikTok helped him win the election. The TikTok CEO will be a guest of honor at his inauguration, alongside other vainglorious tech CEOs who profit off of brain-rot. Our bet would be that Trump tries to trigger the 90-day extension period to wrap up a deal, even if there’s no deal in hand.
Speaking of the nerd section of the inaugural dais: You’d better believe Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed his spot. These days, he absolutely cannot get enough Trump. Trump, Trump, Trump! Of all the CEOs flattering Trump since his reelection, Zuckerberg may be the most overt. He’s undoing content moderation, ridding his company of DEI initiatives, moving staff from lib California to Texas, and gettin’ the dang tampons out of the men’s bathrooms. His company has donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Zuck has been spending time at Mar-a-Lago. He’s described the corporate world as “neutered” and in need of more “masculine energy,” which he’s attempted to remedy by putting UFC chief (and Trump friend) Dana White on the Meta board. What are we to make of Zuckerberg’s shift? We do believe that part of it is tech CEOs like Zuckerberg finally releasing years of pent-up anger at annoying left-wing staffers or federal bureaucrats yelling at him to take down this or that post. But it’s also just how business will be done under Trump. Trump likes Elon Musk, so Jeff Bezos, his space-race rival, has to be on that stage, too. That means Zuckerberg, who has a lot of kiss-and-make-up work to do going back to Trump’s rage at Facebook during the 2020 election, has to be on that stage too. And it means that he wants to beat the Trump administration to the punch in canceling out a lot of the internal reforms he’s made. Zuck’s not the only one doing this. But his innate awkwardness makes him stand out the most.
In a dramatic move this week, Speaker Mike Johnson fired Ohio Rep. Mike Turner as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Johnson afterward said that “this is no slight whatsoever to our outgoing chairman” and that he did a “great job,” but that “we just need fresh horses in some of these places.” We think it’s a bit of a slight to Turner to imply that he’s a washed-up horse. (Besides, North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx, who recently turned 182, was just put in charge of the Rules Committee.) Now, who in a position of authority in the Republican Party might have an issue with Mike Turner? The same, grown-up Mike Turner who didn’t go along with overturning election results in 2021, who criticized Trump’s handling of classified documents, who’s a vociferous supporter of Ukraine aid, and who pushed back against claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs? Right. Turner reportedly said that Johnson cited “Mar-a-Lago concerns” in making his decision—though it’s worth observing that Turner had also made a lot of enemies with Freedom Caucus members who had met with Trump in Florida last week. The Intel Committee had worked pretty well on a bipartisan basis under the leadership of Turner and Democrat Jim Himes. So it had to be blown up.
Republicans in Congress are considering opening a can of worms that they might come to regret. Traditionally, when extraordinary natural disasters strike and relief funds are needed, Congress steps in to cut the check. They just did this in December, with $110 billion in recovery funds largely targeted toward southeastern states following hurricanes Helene and Milton. But there’s a lot of noise among Republicans now to condition California wildfire relief on policy concessions. Among others, that’s Speaker Mike Johnson’s “personal view,” suggesting that relief should be tied to changes in “water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems.” But Johnson is also considering tying wildfire relief to a debt ceiling increase, to compel Democrats to carry the load on what is typically the governing party’s responsibility. Democrats are warning Republicans not to go down this path. “This is a Mistake,” Florida Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, for example, tweeted. “If you start this, it will never end.” Moskowitz understands that if Republicans set conditions for blue-state relief, the favor will eventually be returned, and one day Democrats would condition Florida hurricane relief on, say, federal climate change legislation. This is not to say that California shouldn’t take a good, hard look at its wildfire mitigation policies after the disaster. But California voters are perfectly capable of holding their state and local government accountable on that.
Last week, we wrote about how Senate Democrats, shook by the November election results, were playing along with the Laken Riley Act, an immigration enforcement bill with substantial due process issues that would significantly empower red-state attorneys general to sue the federal government over whatever was on their minds. While 84 senators agreed to debate and amend the bill, Democrats weren’t able to secure any of the changes to it that they wanted this week. Nevertheless, the bill cleared a filibuster at the end of the week with 61 votes—and its biggest Democratic booster, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, didn’t even make the vote. President Trump will be able to sign this significant piece of legislation in his first days in office. The lesson of this is that Democrats don’t really know how to proceed right now. They don’t know how hard to fight with Trump versus how much to work with him, or how to moderate their stance on immigration and immigration enforcement, or whatever other culturally inflected issues may arise. That angst, in the first months of the administration, will present Republicans with more opportunities to split the opposition and move stray priorities. Fortunately for Democrats, this doesn’t have to last forever. Congressional Republicans will soon get to the meat of the agenda—tax breaks paired with cuts to the social safety net—providing Democrats the path back to their roots.
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