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Good morning! Or, alternately, good afternoon or good evening. This is the Surge, a weekly roundup of who’s making headlines in Washington, and you can read it whenever and wherever you please—with one exception. Under no circumstances, that is, do we approve of Surge content being consumed in a bathroom by someone who has already told their significant other that they’ll “be down in a minute.” Get out there and get on with your day, ma’am or sir!
The Surge will be taking a few weeks off, by the way—our next newsletter will go out on Aug. 16—as we take our annual summer trip to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to race go-karts against preteens named Liam and Noah. “Skibidi Toiletface” is a term of respect and admiration in their culture, right?
This week, we have a little bit of good news, the usual quite sizable volume of bad news, and news about Pete Hegseth that is … I don’t know, let’s say bleak comedy overlaid on a foundation of horror and cultural decline? Speaking of which …
1.
Pam Bondi
In retrospect, mistakes were made.
The biggest political event of the week was probably, in our expert estimation, the Wall Street Journal reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi told President Donald Trump in May that his name is mentioned in documents related to the federal investigation of Jeffrey Epstein, world’s most notorious deceased sexual abuser of teenage girls. And it was Bondi who reportedly set events in motion by ordering that the FBI deploy a surge of manpower, in March, onto the job of reviewing Epstein documents for potential release—a task that included flagging instances of Trump’s name. Why would she do that? Why would Trump let her do that? Well, because the entire White House (and the right-wing media system around it) operates in a sort of antigravity fantasy world in which it was simply assumed as fact that a read-through of “the Epstein files” would expose a network of Democratic pedophiles, like various MAGA personalities had been saying they would for years. Trump appointed Bondi to her job because she believes that stuff, and because she believes that anything that makes him look bad must be a hoax that was hoaxed up by the Obama administration’s Department of Treason Hoaxes. And sometimes a flawed process, like putting your conspiracy-theorist defense attorneys in charge of the Department of Justice, can create problematic results.
2.
Mike Johnson
This is not how things normally operate!
How serious is this Epstein stuff for Teflon Trump? One indicator of pretty serious status might be that it’s actually causing problems for him in the House of Representatives, whose Republican members typically defy his wishes only when it comes to intra-conservative disputes—choosing between options, for instance, like “we should limit Medicaid eligibility so we can reduce Elon Musk’s tax rate” versus “we should eliminate the federal government entirely.” This week, though, three Republicans on the Oversight Committee joined with Democrats—Democrats, people—to subpoena Epstein material from the DOJ; in an effort to prevent any further such embarrassments, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson canceled Thursday’s entire schedule, sending the chamber into its August vacation (er, “recess”) a day early. Republican members don’t want to take votes that would allow them to be portrayed as complicit in a sex-predator cover-up, and have demanded that Johnson and the White House spend the next month coming up with what Politico calls “a better solution to the Epstein problem.” In our opinion, this is a little rich, given that these rank-and-file members are the very people responsible for granting essentially complete control over their party to a convicted felon (and known friend of Epstein’s!) who has been accused of literally dozens of instances of sexual misconduct. Maybe the “solution” was to not do that in the first place, hmm? (Trump denies all the allegations and has never been charged with sexual assault, though a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.) But hey, hindsight is 50–50.
3.
Adam Gelb
We will do exactly 201 words of good news.
Right now you’re all probably asking yourselves the same question: Who in tarnation is Adam Gelb, and what’s he doin’ in my Surge? Well, the eminent Mr. G is the president of something called the Council on Criminal Justice, which just released a bunch of crime data based on “a sampling of 42 American cities,” ranging in size from New York to Cary, North Carolina, “whose police departments release data on a timely basis.” And that data says crime is way down, with murder rates dropping by nearly one-fifth this year alone. Why? The best guess of people who study such things is that violence surged a few years ago because of COVID, which disrupted individual lives and wider social support systems in a way that made the population more desperate and less likely to have anything productive to do with its time. Once employment stabilized and systems started filling themselves back in, the crime wave began receding, with the effects still being seen today. Also, we suspect that Adam Gelb has been wearing a bat costume at night to conduct citizen’s arrests of various burglars and henchmen. Watch out for the Gelb-man of Gotham!
4.
Andry Hernández Romero
What was the point?
We don’t think it would be quite right to say that the current media focus on Trump and Epstein is superficial sensationalism; there are tangible consequences to debates about what kind of people should be elevated to leadership positions and how they should be held accountable. Still, there are more direct consequences of government activity happening to millions of people all over the country and world right now as well, like, for example, Andry Hernández Romero, the Venezuelan-born stylist applying for asylum in the U.S. who was sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison in March by the Trump administration on the highly dubious grounds that his tattoos indicated gang membership. (We still haven’t figured out how to concisely explain why the U.S. is sending asylum applicants from other countries to jail in El Salvador, but it’s what happened.) Thanks to a prisoner swap between Venezuela and the U.S., though, Hernández Romero has now been released back to his country of origin, where he told reporters that his experience was “an encounter with torture and death,” that many of the men who were with him have broken bones from being beaten and handcuffed, and that he was sexually abused. One of the people sent back to the U.S. in the swap is an Army veteran who was convicted of triple homicide. The purpose of all of this, mind you, is to make the United States “safer.”
5.
Amichay Eliyahu
“Wiped out.”
Famine is spreading in Gaza; this week, four news organizations said in a joint statement that their journalists in the territory are among those that may die in a mass starvation. (The Israeli military blocked food deliveries to the area for three months during the spring and has, on multiple occasions since, opened fire on Palestinians at food distribution sites, killing dozens, on the grounds that they got too close to the soldiers.) Eliyahu, the Israeli government’s “heritage minister,” responded to questions about hunger in a radio interview by saying—seemingly in an approving manner—that the purpose of Israel’s policy in Gaza is to ensure that its population is “wiped out.” Benjamin Netanyahu did not address the minister’s comments; the United States, for its part, continues to send weapons to Israel, although American public opinion about whether that support should continue, and whether Israel has “used too much military force” in Gaza, is roughly split.
6.
Pete Hegseth
Really starting to wonder whether this young man has his head on straight.
Remember, back in April, when the major story in the country was that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had accidentally messaged what seemed like top-secret details about an imminent airstrike against Yemen’s Houthi rebels to a Signal group chat that included Atlantic magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg? At the time, Hegseth’s public relations strategy centered on contemptuously insisting that the details he sent Goldberg were not classified, and if you thought they probably were, it was likely because you were a pointy-headed civilian pantywaist who wouldn’t know “OPSEC” from your own ass. “Let’s [sic] me get this straight,” he wrote on Twitter/X at one point. “No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. No classified information.” Very normal everyday details that anyone could freely tell to anyone else! Well, this week the Washington Post reported that the Department of Defense inspector general’s office has found evidence that the details Hegseth shared were taken from, quote, “a classified email labeled ‘SECRET/NOFORN.’ ” (NOFORN means don’t show this to foreign officials.) In any other administration, Hegseth would have been fired long ago, and not just for the classified info stuff. Will he get fired now? Probably not, as there has been nary a whisper in the press about Trump being displeased, or even being aware, that this has happened.
7.
Ice Cream Skeleton Guy
What to do in Gdańsk when you’re dead.
Around here, we enjoy a good story about an old-time guy preserved in a bog. We’re not sure why; there’s just something funny about the idea of spending your life thinking about mortality and the cosmos, as humans tend to do, and then falling into a swamp and dying and getting discovered 600 years later because someone is trying to build a parking lot in front of a Burger King. In any case, according to various outlets, archeologists working in Poland have discovered the remains of a medieval warrior under the longtime location of an ice cream parlor in the city of Gdańsk. “Available evidence suggests that the deceased was a person of high social standing—most likely a knight or commander held in particularly high esteem and respect,” said the director of the organization that supervised the excavation. Sure; that’s why he got the most refreshing and delicious burial site! “The skeleton was once a strongly built man over 40 years old, likely around 5’9” in height,” another expert testified, per Popular Mechanics. Just like the Surge, give or take an inch or so and your personal definition of “strongly built”! OK, everyone, have a great weekend!
