Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday. Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which is so grateful to have you as adoring readers but will sue you in North Carolina if you alienate your affection for us. We’ve got a lot of foreign policy this week, a telltale sign that the foreign policy ain’t going great. Domestically, control of the Senate could come down to Alaska, or at least that’s what reporters are telling their editors as they try to secure summer trips. And a Ford factory worker became the new face of the resistance. First, we begin with the slew of scandals and drama at the Justice Department this week and attempt to discern the root of it all. Even by the Trump Justice Department’s standards over the last year, this was an eyebrow-raising week. We learned Sunday night, from the dawg Jay Powell himself, that the Federal Reserve chair was under DOJ investigation, ostensibly for his testimony related to Fed renovation costs, but really because he wasn’t lowering interest rates fast enough for Trump. The White House has tried to distance itself from the investigation—to portray it as D.C.’s U.S. attorney Jeanine Pirro freelancing—but Trump has been pressuring Powell for a long, long time. We also learned this week that federal prosecutors are investigating five additional Democratic lawmakers who posted a video last year urging troops to ignore illegal orders. (The Pentagon has been harassing another Democrat, Sen. Mark Kelly, for months.) Trump had called their video “seditious.” Meanwhile, a wave of DOJ prosecutors resigned under pressure to investigate not the ICE killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis, but Good’s widow instead. Amid the backdrop of a lousier-than-usual week at the DOJ, the most revealing story of the week may have been one in the Wall Street Journal about Trump’s increasing frustration with Attorney General Pam Bondi. “The criticisms,” the Journal wrote, “appear to be part of an intense campaign by Trump to pressure the Justice Department to more aggressively pursue his priorities”—specifically, pursuing his enemies. Consider, too, a separate Journal story about a White House photo op with U.S. attorneys last week during which Trump berated them for being “weak” and complained that they weren’t “moving fast enough to prosecute his favored targets.” Trump has a poor history with attorneys general who, at one point or another, can’t find within the law the answers to his questions. So long as Bondi wants to keep her job, there are many more bad weeks ahead. The retiring North Carolina Republican senator deserves credit this week for offering meaningful pushback to the administration’s threats against Powell. Shortly after Powell’s SOS message went up Sunday night, Tillis announced that he would oppose any of the president’s Fed nominees until the Powell matter was resolved. Given Tillis’ seat on the Banking Committee, that pledge would prevent any Fed nominee—including Powell’s upcoming replacement as chair—from getting voted out of committee. The pushback from Tillis, and a fair number of other Republican senators, was enough to calm markets and put the White House on its back foot. Tillis, liberated from electoral concerns, has been speaking up against the administration’s errors more openly in the last couple of weeks. We could leave it at that. But the Surge’s bylaws are clear that no nit be left unpicked, and so we have to quibble with his framing. Tillis’ argument is that the administration is making some dumb decisions because Trump is receiving bad advice. Whichever adviser pursued the “vindictive prosecution” against Powell, he said, needs to “grow up and give the president better advice.” And in terms of seizing Greenland, he said separately that he blamed “whoever told the president that this was a viable path. It doesn’t make sense.” We understand that calling the principal himself an idiot wouldn’t be the most effective means of dissuading him from destructive ideas. But it is the principal, not the advisers, who are the problem. Trump wants to annex Greenland because it looks big on a map, and so the advisers are competing with each other to achieve that for him. He insists the Fed lower interest rates faster, so there’s a Cabinet-wide contest to do what it takes. The bad ideas are coming from the man himself, and he won’t take no for an answer. The president reiterated on Wednesday that the United States “needs” Greenland, and that anything less than Greenland being “in the hands of the UNITED STATES” is “unacceptable.” And on Friday, while a bipartisan congressional delegation visited Copenhagen to reassure Danish leaders that Congress stood in the way of Trump’s Greenland plans (sure you are, guys), Trump was threatening tariffs against countries if they “don’t go along with Greenland.” You can actually hear his dopamine rush when he says this. On that note, let’s look at a couple of consequences of Trump’s yearlong effort to antagonize the United States’ closest friends and allies in the free world. In a sentence we never quite thought we’d have to write, numerous European Union countries are deploying troops and military personnel to Greenland in a show of support to Denmark against American aggression towards its allies. Repeat: Europe is sending troops to Greenland while America threatens to seize it. And on Friday during a visit to Beijing, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney agreed to slash its 100 percent tariff on Chinese electric cars in exchange for China importing more Canadian agricultural products, and said China had become a more “predictable” trading partner than the U.S. Can the Supreme Court go ahead and release that opinion nuking Trump’s tariffs powers soon, please? The major recruitment news of the week was that former Democratic Alaska Rep. Mary Peltola launched a bid for Senate against incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan. Peltola, who’s reusing the “Fish, family, and freedom” slogan that carried her to House victory in 2022 before a narrow reelection loss in 2024, gives Democrats a fighting chance in a red state where Peltola has won statewide, given that there’s only one congressional district in Alaska, in very recent memory. Her recruitment is also a critical piece of a much larger puzzle: Giving Democrats a chance—we’re saying there’s a chance!—to pick up the net four seats they would need to retake control of the Senate in the midterms. If Democrats can retain all of the seats they control (including tough races in Michigan and Georgia), the path to Senate control runs through winning the open seat in North Carolina, finally replacing Susan Collins in Maine, hoping ex-Sen. Sherrod Brown can oust Sen. John Husted in Ohio, and then Peltola in Alaska. This is the way, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer gave 18 billion interviews this week describing it as such. It’s important to observe that each step along this path is quite difficult, and completing it would require a midterm wave in Democrats’ favor. Stranger things have happened. Even a handful of days ago, a U.S. intervention against the Iranian regime, as the country was swarmed with protests that were being brutally put down, seemed like it was imminent. Military options had been prepared and presented for the president; U.S. personnel were being advised to leave the U.S. military base in Qatar. By Wednesday night, though, Trump said that “we’ve been told that the killing in Iran is stopping—it’s stopped—it’s stopping. And there’s no plan for executions, or an execution.” Iran had signaled as much on Thursday. What Iran has or has not stopped, we don’t know. But this came as the administration received advice from allies in the region—including Saudi Arabia and Israel—not to intervene, arguing that the protests weren’t strong enough to topple the regime and U.S. intervention would cause regional chaos. Now, Trump could very well surprise-bomb Iran overnight if someone cracks a little too much fresh-ground pepper on his steak. But with the apparent deescalation, the Surge wants to send its thoughts and prayers to South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. As we wrote last week, he was riding high on the Venezuela intervention and hoped that Trump might fulfill Graham’s top bucket-list item—regime change in Iran—next. Graham was all over TV and social media this week egging on his audience of one. He described Trump as “Reagan Plus” and openly urged him to kill Ayatollah Khamenei. He met with the Shah of Iran’s son, who’s eager to take control of the country. When Trump’s tone shift came later in the week, Graham scrambled to deny that Trump had swung against action or that the protests had ebbed in Iran, and said that he no longer wanted to be allies with allies that told Trump not to get involved. It’s always hard for Graham when a country goes un-bombed, and this is the big one. Let’s give him a little space. Last week in the Senate, five Republicans joined all Democrats to advance a war powers resolution barring the president from using military force in Venezuela without congressional sign-off. Despite his administration’s firm promise that they have no additional military plans in Venezuela, Trump was furious, saying those five Republicans “should never be elected to office again.” Republican leaders and administration officials set off a fierce pressure campaign to kill the resolution. The pressure campaign was successful. On Wednesday, Senate Republicans killed the resolution with another procedural vote, having convinced two of the five Republicans—Sens. Josh Hawley and Todd Young—to back off. What were their excuses? Both said that they received a variety of “assurances” from the administration that there were no troops in Venezuela at the moment, and that if the administration does want to send troops in the future, it will totally ask Congress first. Now, the Surge doesn’t think it would be that much effort to encode those promises into law, to be extra careful. You just go to the Senate floor, stick your thumb up, and you’ve voted for it. But what do we know? Trump’s team organized a nice little afternoon for him on Tuesday: a visit to Michigan to visit Ford’s F-150 factory, where the big trucks get made. Neat! As he was walking through the plant with Ford’s CEO, a 40-year-old line worker later identifying himself as TJ Sabula shouted “Pedophile protector!” at Trump. The president pointed back at him, said “Fuck you,” and then gave him the middle finger. Sabula was suspended. Sabula, in an interview with the Washington Post, said that he had “no regrets whatsoever” about what he did. “I don’t feel as though fate looks upon you often, and when it does, you better be ready to seize the opportunity,” he said. “And today I think I did that.” While Sabula is concerned about losing his job—and maybe should be a little worried about, like, ICE showing up to his door, pretending that he tried to run over the president with one of the trucks he was assembling—his act of heckling is being well remunerated. A couple of GoFundMe pages in his name have raised over $800,000.