Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, the only politics newsletter that would CRUSH either Joe Biden or Donald Trump on the golf course and thus, under biblical law, has a claim to the presidency that must be honored.

Reader, it was a week to remember, and we’re not even lying this time. A Squad member was primaried out of Congress for the first time. And yet, Lauren Boebert survives. One Republican is on a lonely quest to screw up his entire party’s messaging around in vitro fertilization.

But that’s all back-end stuff, for the suckers and losers. Let’s begin with the agonizingly consequential debate that America had the misfortune of watching Thursday night.

By Jim Newell

President Joe Biden turned in a debate performance Thursday night so dreadful that the Democratic Party is now deciding whether he should be replaced before its August nominating convention. This did not come out of nowhere. As the Surge has tried to point out, to limited reception, it was the Biden campaign—not the Trump campaign!—that had to be dragged into agreeing to debate, that trimmed the standard number of debates from three to two, and that moved them up to a more forgettable time in the cycle. And why would they do that? Well, anyone who has tried to watch Joe Biden speak without cards for more than 30 seconds in the past couple of years should have seen that such a performance was well within the range of possibilities. The inability of Democrats to have this conversation earlier has delved the party into panic several months before Election Day, and it’s made Trump the favorite to win. Those Democrats who enforced this strategy of suppressing discussion of Biden’s fitness may want to spend the next few days in quiet reflection.

For arguably the first time in his nearly 10-year political career, Donald Trump wasn’t the main story coming out of a political event in which he participated. Even if that’s good news for him, it probably pisses him off. Trump, at least in the first half of the debate, appeared to be uncharacteristically willing to heed advice from his advisers; you could tell that he was summoning all of his energy not to do a malevolent mock stutter of Biden as the president floundered for his words. It’s not as if Trump was reborn as the perfect candidate, though.........

© Slate