What Exactly Does Nikki Haley Expect Her Voters to Do Now?

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

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s weekly newsletter on politics, which, after reading some tweets about the Alitos’ front yard, is now officially a vexillologist and teeming with takes.

We’re kicking off the best summer of our lives with a fittingly gloomy edition, a true lineup of punishers. We’ve got pine tree flags. We’ve got new VP candidates. We’ve got a “unified Reich.” Hell, we’ve got the gloomiest place of all: the United Kingdom. Yikes! Halloween comes but twice a year.

Let us begin, though, with someone falling in line, right on schedule.

1. Nikki Haley

Trump’s offer is this: nothing.

The distant runner-up in this year’s Republican presidential primaries has retreated from public view since ending her campaign in March. What’s she been up to? Some say she has been apprenticing as a cobbler in the Italian countryside; others, that she’s formed an ice cave—and won the trust of indigenous penguin tribes—in Antarctica. What she has really been up to, though, is workshopping the precise language with which she’d come out in support of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign after months of portraying him as a mortal threat to the republic. In a public appearance Wednesday, she described President Joe Biden as a “catastrophe” and announced that she would be voting for Trump. She added, however, “Trump would be smart to reach out to the millions of people who voted for me and continue to support me, and not assume that they’re just going to be with him.” Why shouldn’t he assume that, though? Trump spent months threatening Haley and playing racist word games with her name, assuming that she’d just “be with him” in the end. And so she is. Republican voters who are tired of Trump but abhor Biden are just as capable as Haley is of deciding to support the lesser of two evils. Trump could choose to be conciliatory for the very first time in his life, or he could let gravity do its thing. Hmm. Which path do you think he’ll choose?

2. Samuel Alito

New meme flag just dropped. Er, was raised.

Last week we learned that an upside-down American flag, a treasured symbol among “Stop the Steal”–ers, was hanging outside the home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito just days before Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. He said that it had all been his wife’s doing, and he blamed the couple’s obnoxious neighbors for her decision to hoist a symbol of support for those who believed that the 2020 election was stolen. This week, the New York Times reported that the Alitos flew another extremely online flag at their beach house in New Jersey last year. This was the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, also known as the Pine Tree flag because it’s just a white flag with a pine tree on it (and the words An Appeal to Heaven). Alito offered no comment on this one, not even giving reporters a perfunctory point of the finger toward the ol’ ball and chain. The Times describes the flag as one “that was carried by rioters at the Capitol” on Jan. 6—indeed, it’s visible in the article’s photos from Jan. 6—and adds that it has recently become a repurposed symbol for “a religious strand of the ‘Stop the Steal’ campaign and for a push to remake American government in Christian terms.” Who knows what specific political statement the Alitos meant to make with it. But it is an explicitly political symbol, and judges aren’t supposed to do politics. What will be Alito’s punishment for his many flag crimes, you ask? Nothing. He’s got it made.

3. Rick Scott

Never stop hustling.

A brief recap of the past couple of years in the career of Florida Sen. Rick Scott: In the 2022 midterm election cycle, he chaired the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Under his tenure, Republicans lost one Senate seat on net despite the favorable conditions of a midterm year under an unpopular Democratic president. He allowed Trump to handpick lousy, unelectable candidates, and Scott himself complicated Republican candidates’ messaging by freelancing his own policy blueprint that could have allowed Medicare and Social Security to lapse. To cap this tenure, Scott challenged Sen. Mitch McConnell for his role leading Senate Republicans, only to get smoked in that election too. Scott has since learned his lesson, though, and is pursuing a more head-down, media-averse approach toward securing small victories for Florida going forward. Just kidding—he announced Wednesday that he was running for leader again, joining Sens. John Thune and John Cornyn in the contest to replace McConnell. There is no world in which Scott is more popular among Senate Republicans than either of his competitors, and there’s no organic way for him to be elected Republican leader against either of them. What he seems to be banking on is Trump’s winning the presidency and insisting on Scott as the next Republican leader. But even then, Scott would run into the problem that Senate leadership elections are done by secret ballot. This is poised to go about as well as his previous run.

4. Donald Trump

When he’s Reich, he’s Reich.

Reader, some tremendous news: Industrial Strength Significantly Increased, Driven by the Creation of a Unified Reich. This was a headline in a social media video shared by Donald Trump’s campaign last weekend. The problem is that when we’re talking Reichs, the mind immediately goes to the Third Reich, as the mind of the (noncampaign) creator of this video likely did. The Trump campaign eventually deleted the video from its account and, according to campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, “it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court.” We mostly buy this—the celebratory headline about the creation of a new “Reich” was in smaller print—but it does raise additional concerns that some of Trump’s most adoring fans support him because they detect fascist aromas. But you know who else likes Trump? More voters in swing states, at the moment, than those who like Biden. We’ll see if a potential guilty verdict, as soon as next week, changes those margins. If not, finding some kind of constitutional authority (Article something, Section another) to cut gas prices in half would be most likely to do the trick.

5. Chuck Schumer

You’ll vote again, and you’ll like it.

With the important business of the year behind it, campaign season was in full swing in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer held another vote on the bipartisan border security bill that the body had rejected earlier this year. If you’ll recall that ordeal, Republicans had insisted on border security in exchange for another round of aid to Ukraine. But when the eventual compromise legislation came out, Republicans, egged on by Trump, rejected it as too soft … and, more importantly, as a complicating factor for their plan to run against Biden on the border. What did exhuming this corpse of a bill for a second swing at the gallows—it failed 43 to 50 on Thursday—bring for Schumer? In theory, it would allow Biden and vulnerable Senate Democrats a renewed opportunity to argue that it was Republicans’ fault for not finding a solution. It’s not nothing. But the Surge still thinks it’ll take a lot more than that for Americans upset with the situation, of which there are many, to blame someone other than the current president. Now we’ll wait to see whether Biden actually announces the executive actions he’s hinted at to relieve pressure at the border.

6. Tom Cotton

To frighten the voters or not?

This week, a new name was floated for vice president, likely as misdirection—or what we in the biz call “content.” Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton “has unexpectedly emerged as a top contender to become Donald J. Trump’s running mate,” the New York Times reported Friday, “a signal that the former president is heavily weighing experience and the ability to run a disciplined campaign over other factors.” Yeah … it’s a “signal” that Trump saw him on his bathroom TV recently. What does Cotton bring to the ticket? Well, if you think the American people want someone who’s going to tell them that they have 30 pushups left, he’s your guy. Cotton and Trump do have some important differences—Cotton has a more interventionist approach to military use and, crucially, was outspoken against Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 Electoral College results—but they share a similar thirst for excessive law enforcement and rolling tanks through the college quad. And Trump, ever the people’s champion, appreciates the fact that Cotton “is a fellow Ivy League graduate.” We suspect that this float won’t go too far. Cotton is just so … severe. On the off chance it does, though, the American people may want to start getting in shape. There will be fitness tests.

7. Rishi Sunak

A brief update from His Majesty’s Surge.

His Majesty’s Surge has “nicked” a spot on this week’s list to give an update on the Merry Land of Britain, an ancestral world power. This week, the U.K.’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, scheduled a general election in which his own conservative party, the Tories, is expected to get wiped out after 14 uninterrupted years of daily misery, national decline, and global humiliation. In a symbolic move, Sunak scheduled the election for July 4, a date synonymous with British failure. Why did Sunak set it so soon, when he could have waited all the way till January? Well, the nation has had one good quarter of marginally decent economic news for the first time in what feels like decades, with recession in the rearview and inflation cooling to its lowest level in three years. It’s not often that economic indicators—not to mention other key indexes, like measures of human happiness—come back as even remotely “good” in the United Kingdom. So as soon as Sunak saw a single nice headline, boom! It was time to call the election. Should things go the way they’re projected, it’s likely the next PM will be Labour’s Keir Starmer, who is … some guy. No one will like him either. Now, let’s all enjoy some beach and barbecues!