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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which was off last Saturday so will now catch you up on the previous week’s news: Natalie Harp. There, you’re caught up.

August “silly season” continues with the usual slapstick stories about … international trade wars and a possible Russian attack against NATO. (Just ask ChatGPT about it, Darline Graham.) Elsewhere, Republicans have come to terms with the politics around data centers, and Hakeem Jeffries held a revealing meeting.

But first, This Week in Donald Trump Making Life Awful for Senate Republicans.

This week in bold ideas: a trade war with Canada two months from Election Day.

Talks with Canada on a trade agreement have broken down, which means the trade war is back on. Trump has announced new tariffs on billions of dollars of Canadian goods, and Canada has responded in kind. The breakdown features the usual Trumpian accoutrements: a personal spat with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, whom Trump has compared unfavorably to the Canadian politician’s late brother, and whose trash talk has prompted Trump to pretend to rename Lake Ontario to “Lake America.” Each day we live through this era, we get vastly dumber.

As dumb as it all is, the consequences are quite real economically—and politically, for Trump’s own (theoretical) team. It’s not just that this latest trade war will raise costs at a time when “high costs” are the biggest political issue in the country. It’s going to raise costs particularly in states that are either bordering or in close proximity to Canada and rely on trade with it. States like, we don’t know, Michigan, Maine, Ohio, New Hampshire, and Alaska. Anything going on in those states in November? Any Senate races, by chance?

In Maine and Michigan especially, this has to be mortifying to Republicans. Republican candidates Susan Collins and Mike Rogers have better-than-expected opportunities to win, given the tumult Democrats went through in selecting their nominees. Now Trump has gone out of his way to make their lives much more challenging. Sometimes (regularly), we’re genuinely unsure whom the president wants to win this fall.

The great data-center pivot.

Last November, the Texas governor had proudly declared his state the “epicenter of AI development” when he announced a $40 billion investment with Google. Since then, data centers have sprung up across Texas. But in the past couple of weeks—and with his bid for a fourth........

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