Trump Has the Opportunity to Do the Funniest Thing
Sign up for the Surge, the newsletter that covers the most important political nonsense of the week, delivered to your inbox every Saturday.
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s politics newsletter that has no time for a joke right here because we have important business to discuss.
Starting next week, the Surge is going to look different: sleeker and fresher but still phenomenally trenchant. Alongside a refreshed design, the Surge will break down the news of the week into three categories: What you need to pay attention to now, what you need to keep an eye on, and which story is a bunch of nonsense you should ignore.
Also, starting in October, the Surge will be available exclusively to Slate Plus subscribers. If you would like to subscribe to Slate Plus and the many riches it offers, use promo code SURGE25 at checkout for a 25 percent discount on a full-year subscription. We appreciate you, Surge Nation.
Anyway, enough with the business talk. Let’s chat about something fun, like American politics, and its most important feature: money.
There’s no way someone like Trump would simply keep the money for himself, is there?
MAGA Inc. is the president’s super PAC. As of July 31, it had $403 million on hand. The Trump associates who run it have kept telling and telling and telling House and Senate members that the balance will be spent on their races this fall, a cash bomb to help save GOP majorities in Congress. But it is now September of an election year, and the super PAC has thrown only a few bucks here and there. Where’s the cash?
The Atlantic reported last week that Donald Trump was planning to spend soon, but with a twist: He had ordered “a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests.” In other words, he called for ads celebrating himself. As you can guess, given Trump’s yawning unpopularity, this idea is going over poorly with the traditional GOP consultant class.
Beyond that, will MAGA Inc. unload in individual races, mentioning—or attacking—individual candidates? Given that it is, again, September, Republicans are starting to doubt they’ll see much of this money. As the Washington Post reported, GOP leaders have begun to “conclude that it’s too late to fully deploy the cash in the midterms and that he intends to hold on to much of it for his own purposes.” This, dear reader. This is … it’s perfect, isn’t it?
Texas Senate candidate hardest hit.
The single candidate most in need of MAGA Inc.’s largesse is Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton. Given all of his scandals, baggage, and poor personal fundraising abilities, Paxton could use a heavy infusion of cash to defeat........
