The Surge is your weekly political sanity check: What matters, what might, and what’s just political theater. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that, since its redesign, is looking sharper than Jon Husted’s ass.

We have only two-and-a-half more weeks until these damnable midterms are over, after which all politics will cease and this will become a newsletter about spelunking. Hooray! This week: Donald Trump is so mad about fuel prices screwing up the midterms that he might just give Europe to Russia. A White House press secretary has come and gone since we last wrote, and now she can return to being a lawyer (maybe?). Jon Ossoff said WHAT? There are competitive Senate races WHERE?

But first! It was super PAC donor disclosure week, and you’ll never guess who’s spending the most money this election cycle. (Hint: It’s the guy with the most money.)

What matters now: The biggest player in the midterms has been hiding in plain sight.

Recall in the spring, during the Texas primary season, the big conundrum that Senate Republicans faced over money. Their concern was that if baggage-laden Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn for the nomination, the party would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to (attempt to) rescue him in the fall, money that it could be spending in traditional battlegrounds. Then, after Paxton rode Trump’s last-minute endorsement to win the primary, there was a lengthy standoff between irritated Senate Republicans and Trump’s super PAC over who should foot the bill to rescue Paxton.

The conundrum was resolved around Labor Day. Trump’s MAGA Inc. has put $30 million into the state. But it’s Texas PAC, a spinoff of Senate Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, that’s done the bulk of the work, having poured $148 million into the state as of this writing. It both did and didn’t come as a surprise that Senate Republicans so easily let themselves be pushed around by Trump’s operation into cleaning up Trump’s mess. But with third-quarter fundraising filings now coming in, we can see the deal that was struck:

Senate Republicans’ PAC spent the rescue money, but they were just a vessel. The guy really picking up the tab was Elon Musk.

Senate Leadership Fund announced this week that it raised $273 million in the third quarter, with a full $158 million of that—58 percent—coming from Musk. In total, Musk has now given a jokelike $366 million this cycle, making him comfortably the biggest donor of either party. With that $158 million gift to the Senate Leadership Fund, he made months of Republican worries about how to (attempt to!) rescue Paxton look foolish. It was resolved with two checks, two strokes of the pen. No hard decisions over resources would have to be made after all.

For all the attention Musk........

© Slate