Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which dares to dream: If Bob from Chicago can become Pope, can the Surge from Washington, D.C., become grand ayatollah of Iran? What’s the pay?

This week: Brian Kemp has better things to do than spend three days a week in the Senate. Former President Joe Biden offered proof of life. Republican moderates are flexing previously unknown muscles. President Donald Trump watched a movie and now wants to reopen an old jail. We asked a bunch of trees what would be a good final entry, and boy, do trees have a sick sense of humor!

But first, a senator puts on his big-boy pants.

1. Thom Tillis

Rare spine sighting.

Trump placed an especially ludicrous test on the Senate by pressing it to confirm “Eagle Ed” Martin, the interim U.S. attorney for D.C., to the position indefinitely. Martin’s nomination was a joke. He had no prosecutorial experience, had lost repeated bids for political office, was supportive of the #StopTheSteal movement, and forgot to disclose to the Senate his hundreds of appearances on Russian state-sponsored media programs. Trump, of course, liked him because of all the Jan. 6 stuff. But his involvement in #StopTheSteal, support for Jan. 6 defendants, and investigation of Jan. 6 prosecutors also closed off his path to confirmation in the Senate. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, a key vote on the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced this week that he wouldn’t support Martin’s nomination because of his posture toward Jan. 6.

It’s a rare thing to see a Republican senator commit to killing a favored nominee of Trump’s in committee; we believe, in fact, that this is the first time we’ve seen it. And while the MAGA mediaverse quickly moved into formation to threaten Tillis, Trump seemed to take the news relatively well, saying on Thursday that it’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Martin is “a terrific person, and he wasn’t getting the support from people that I thought,” he told reporters. “I can only lift that little phone so many times in a day, but we have somebody else that will be great.” Great, great, great. Just great …

2. House Republican moderates

They’re … asserting themselves??

We have to issue—for now—a partial mea culpa to the House Republican moderates. Our belief, as Republicans began writing their “one big, beautiful bill,” was that the mods would whine, gripe, and draw red lines about spending cuts they’d never go along with—and ultimately lose the intraparty battle to spending hawks in the House Freedom Caucus and go along with whatever they wanted. But moderates have put in a surprisingly strong showing this week. Two of the most controversial proposals for Medicaid cuts—lowering the federal match rates and instituting per capita caps for Obamacare expansion enrollees—are just about dead. Meanwhile, a tax increase for the wealthy is back in the discussion (depending on Trump’s mood swings) and blue-state Republicans are feeling emboldened to increase the deductibility of state and local taxes (SALT).

The surest sign that things have moved in moderates’ favor, though, is how mad the deficit hawks are. Right now, they’re at a

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