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Welcome to this weekend’s edition of the Surge, which wonders why there was no speculation about whether the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner attack was a conspiracy to secure more material for political newsletters. And now we’re not even writing it up!

What do we write up instead? Another American right was lost to the pen of Samuel Alito. Jim Comey spent a day at the beach, and you won’t believe what happened next. Trump is mad at Germany and so may remove American troops from there. (Don’t you usually keep troops around the people you don’t like?)

Let’s begin with a double dose of the sudden political developments in Lobster Country.

Last fall we described the Maine Democratic Senate primary between Gov. Janet Mills and oysterman Graham Platner as the “marquee” and “blockbuster” Democratic primary of the cycle. We do stand by that! We did, however, expect the race to at least last until primary day. Instead, Mills dropped out this week, citing a lack of “financial resources” needed to keep the campaign going. Were the race close, maybe those resources could’ve materialized. It never was, though, with Platner leading her roughly 2-to-1 in public polling ahead of the June primary. Her more recent attack ads against Platner’s poor choice of tattoos and history of dumb comments on Reddit had gone nowhere, just as they made no dent in his support last fall when stories about them were first published.

This is unheard of in recent Senate Democratic races. Typically, in competitive seats where Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer personally recruits a candidate and lines up party resources behind that candidate, Democratic party voters—innately anxious about blowing a winnable race—fall in line. But Mills found herself on the losing end of every post-2024 trend in Democratic Party politics: Too old, too establishment, too nice to Sen. Susan Collins, too uncombative—and too close to Schumer, whose numbers among Democrats have tanked. She may have known it might go this way, having had to be dragged into the race by Schumer in the first place. What a flop.

The great news for Platner is that he won a Democratic Senate primary against the governor and the national party a month before the primary was even going to take place. What a sensational feeling! The bad news is that he now needs to defeat Susan Collins—the literal Susan Collins—in order to take a seat that Democrats sorely need if they want any hope of taking back the Senate and restraining an imperial president. Collins has not lost an election since the 1994 governor’s race. Her mystique of invincibility accomplished legendary status in 2020 when, after not leading in a single public poll all cycle, she cruised to victory by........

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