Congress’ Perpetual Coup Machine Is Merely Resting

Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s beloved politics newsletter, which neatly occupies the space in your brain eaten by worms.

Donald Trump is figuring out how to get himself put in jail without having to spend time in jail. Bernie Sanders has seen his shadow and will be in the Senate for six more years. And, having blacked out on tuna fish sandwiches, the Surge can’t remember one way or another whether we’ve met Kim Jong-un.

First, though, Mike Johnson and his friends are promising to make this the best summer of their lives.

1. Mike Johnson

Enjoy it while it lasts.

A threat from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has come and gone, and Mike Johnson is still standing as the House speaker. The Georgia congresswoman, having failed to rally meaningful support behind her plan to oust Johnson while irritating Trump in the process, decided to get it over with this week and force a vote on removing Johnson as speaker. In a nice break from this Congress’ tendency to entertain speaker battles that last weeks at a time, this one was taken care of in five minutes, with 359 members voting to table (kill) her measure and only 43 willing to advance it. So Johnson’s job is safe. But for how long? While it’s unlikely that there will be another run on Johnson’s speakership before the election, now that most of the difficult decisions for the year are in the rearview, it’s no sure thing that he’d be able to survive the next one. House Democrats made a one-time-only deal here to backstop him after he put Ukraine aid up for a vote. Since Johnson’s job for the remainder of 2024 will be to make Democrats look terrible ahead of the election, he shouldn’t expect their support going forward. Then there’s the question of House GOP leadership elections in the next Congress. There’s no doubt that Johnson will draw challengers, and plenty of doubt that he can win in such a situation. He should savor this moment as the perpetual coup machine that is the House GOP comes for them all.

2. Donald Trump

The problem with being jailed is that you’d be jailed.

It was a long week for the big guy in court. First, he spent days trying, and failing, to contain himself as former pornographic actress Stormy Daniels, who alleges to have had an affair with Trump, took the stand. Justice Juan Merchan had to admonish Trump for “cursing audibly” and “shaking his head visually.” That was not, however, the only scolding he would receive from Merchan this week. Merchan warned that Trump’s repeated violations of his gag order were proving that $1,000 fines were no longer doing the trick and that, “as I don’t want to impose a jail sanction … I want you to understand that I will if necessary and appropriate.” Jail presents a prisoner’s dilemma for Trump. (Miss that? A prisoner’s dilemma.) On the one hand, he might interpret a brief jail stint as an excellent political opportunity. He loves martyrdom. On the other hand, being jailed requires actually being jailed. Most people strongly prefer not to be jailed—including Trump, who’s running for president of the United States to avoid having to go to jail. Speaking as a collective, the Surge would prefer not to talk our way into jail time of any duration, but Trump’s mileage may vary.

3. Kristi Noem

Addicted to the rush of humiliating interviews.

Another dilemma for those playing at home: Say it’s release week for your book and you’ve got all sorts of interviews lined up to maximize sales and get rich. You know, going into each interview, however, that you’re guaranteed to look like a fool. What do you do? Well, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem began the week courting any and all comers. Each time the Surge looked at social media, there was a new clip of Noem on either mainstream media or conservative media, being unable to answer questions about the dog she shot or whether she met North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, despite there being no evidence that she did. She finally lost it when Fox Business host Stuart Varney kept bugging her about whether she had discussed “the dog” with Trump. “Enough, Stuart. This interview is ridiculous, which you are doing right now,” Noem said. “So you need to stop.” As moments go, it’s right up there with the Newsmax host telling the onetime vice presidential hopeful, “I don’t even think you’re on the list.” Eventually, she caved and canceled some remaining interviews. Well! Nice little three-week arc here. Goodbye forever.

4. Mike Collins

What $174,000 in congressional salary gets you these days.

Has the Surge somehow not talked about Rep. Mike Collins’ social media posts yet? We apologize for this lapse in service. Collins is a replacement-level Republican congressman from Georgia who has distinguished himself, one way or another, through his posting. His favorite joke is one about buying his political enemies tickets on “Pinochet Air,” a reference to the late Chilean dictator whose regime threw dissenters from helicopters midair. Things have, somehow, taken nastier turns of late, though. In early March, replying to a right-wing poster’s oblique reference to a Washington Post reporter’s being Jewish, Collins wrote, “Never was a second thought.” Earlier this week, he reposted a video in which a campus counterprotester was making monkey sounds toward a Black pro-Palestinian protester with the caption “Ole Miss taking care of business.” That one he actually bothered to try cleaning up with a statement. Within a couple of days, though, he was back off the wagon, tweeting: “You either die a Kennedy with a hole in the brain or live long enough to become a Kennedy with a hole in the brain.” (A spokeswoman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he was riffing on a line from The Dark Knight. You remember the scene, where Batman and the Joker, who are good friends, tell dead Kennedy jokes over beers.) Anyway, we don’t know why this guy wants to be in Congress. What is the point of him going to and from Washington each week? Does any single person in the United States or the world, including Mike Collins, gain anything from Mike Collins’ being a congressman? This applies to, eh, 350 or so others.

5. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

… Is the coast clear to make some jokes about this yet?

Whether or not you liked Collins’ Kennedy joke, no one can deny that it was a timely reference to current events! If you’ve been watching the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign and been wondering, What’s with this guy?, well, a worm ate his brain. (Or at least that’s what he said in 2012 divorce proceedings to avoid shelling out alimony to his ex.) In Kennedy’s own Hemingwayesque description, according to a New York Times deposition review, a doctor had told him that an abnormality in his brain “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died.” It’s just one of those things. Separately, though, Kennedy also claimed that he had suffered mercury poisoning around the same time, after, in the Times’ words, “subsisting on a diet heavy on predatory fish, notably tuna and perch, both known to have elevated mercury levels.” (“I loved tuna fish sandwiches,” Kennedy told the Times.) Brain doctors should be moderating any and all presidential debates this fall, as the medical condition of those (potentially) three brains are really the only three unexplored questions from here on out.

6. Bernie Sanders

Old man runs for Senate reelection.

It took until early May for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to decide whether he would be on the ballot six months later. But did you really think Bernie Sanders would retire? To do what? This week Sanders announced his decision to run for a fourth term, one that would begin when he’s 83 years old. Now, if you’re one of those people who’s always saying, Ooh, why don’t the old politicians ever leave?, Sanders’ case is a textbook one. It took him 16 years of climbing the seniority ranks to chair a major committee—in this case, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—and assume a relatively powerful position in the body crafting policy. He's held that job for only two years and would like to do so for many more. This is a big part of why senators—specifically Democratic senators, who don’t have committee chairman term limits—keep running when they are old. And the reason voters keep electing the old people is that they’ve made the rational decision to reelect the person who’s achieved meaningful power to wield on their behalf, rather than a freshman who’s starting from scratch. But also, yeah, the old people like the perks of being a senator (free lunch, attention, distraction from one’s mental doom loops about impending death, etc.).

7. Ted Cruz

A challenging week of having to do something productive.

The Senate spent this week working to reauthorize the Federal Aviation Administration, in a major bill tweaking airline policy to ensure (ideally) that all the planes stop falling apart during flights. The five-year bill eventually passed the Senate by an 88-to-4 vote Thursday night, with the four opposing senators being the pairs from Maryland and Virginia who are furious about more flights being added out of Reagan National Airport, just outside D.C. (More on that here.) But one of the delights for senators over the past several days was watching Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the bill manager on the GOP side, have to play a pragmatic role rather than screaming in opposition from the sidelines. It was Ted Cruz who had to plead with his colleagues not to insist on amendment votes that could unravel the entire coalition supporting the bill. It was Ted Cruz who was frustrated by the “obstinance” of his fellow senators. And with this new territory came an awful lot of hazing from his colleagues. Cruz, according to the Hill, “has been on the receiving end of numerous jokes from colleagues during weekly Senate GOP luncheons each of the past two weeks.” Cruz himself told the Hill that one moderate member “was having great joy giving me grief” during Wednesday’s party lunch and that he “just laughed and said, ‘I’m not even going to fight back.’ ” It’ll all be worth it. Cruz is one of the only vaguely vulnerable GOP senators up for reelection this year, and now he’ll have a bipartisan bill under his belt to balance his reputation as an annoyer of colleagues. Remember to complain to Cruz if you have a flight delay in the next five years.