The Agonizing Consequences of That Catastrophic Debate

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

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.

1. Joe Biden

Catastrophe.

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.

2. Donald Trump

Surpassing the world’s lowest bar.

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. He delivered more than enough obvious lies, dodges, sneers, and racism, especially as the debate went on, to remind voters that just because Biden has his own serious problems, Trump remains repellent. We’re interested to see how long Trump can allow himself to remain in the background as the Democratic Party melts itself into a radioactive puddle. Can he make it, say, 48 hours without getting bored and deciding to streak at a Yankees game? His resolve will be tested.

3. Kamala Harris

Do I get to be president now??

The Surge still has a hard time seeing Democrats ditching Biden. Getting Biden to agree to withdraw would be the easy part, and that wouldn’t be anywhere close to easy. The convention would be a mess. Republicans would file all sorts of lawsuits protesting Democrats’ switcheroo, and even if these suits were scurrilous, well, we do have a Supreme Court that punched homeless people, allowed a jailbreak for Jan. 6 defendants, and gutted the regulatory state just on Friday morning. There could be tricky ballot access questions. The other oft-cited source of consternation is that Biden’s replacement atop the ticket would almost certainly be Vice President Kamala Harris, for a few reasons. She’s already on the ticket. She’s already ingrained in the campaign and wouldn’t have to start a presidential run from scratch. She’s next in line. And, within Democratic politics, skipping over the first Black woman to serve as vice president for a lesser-known white candidate would be unacceptable. The only reason it wouldn’t be Harris as the replacement is if Harris decided to withdraw on her own. All that said, Democrats who’ve decided that Harris is unacceptable atop the ticket may want to give her a second look. For all her faults as a politician, she would not have had trouble rebutting what Trump said about abortion, about Medicare and Social Security, about Jan. 6, or about any of Democrats’ other bread-and-butter issues in that debate. She can get the damn message out, something the current top of the ticket apparently cannot do. She’s not the end of the world.

4. Jamaal Bowman

The fire alarm gets even.

Left-wingers in the Squad have faced a barrage of House primaries over the years since their formation after the 2018 election cycle. This year, for the first time, one of those primaries was actually successful. Moderate Westchester County Executive George Latimer comfortably ousted Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16^th District, which covers a chunk of Westchester County and a sliver of the Bronx. The race was the most expensive House primary in history, with the major player being the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s super PAC, which supported Latimer with a whopping $14 million. This is one of those races that the Surge wishes it could run a controlled experiment of in an alternate dimension, in which both Bowman and Latimer’s side each spent, say, $2 million. Because Bowman was vulnerable well before AIPAC ran an ad—which is why AIPAC saw its marquee opportunity in the first place. Bowman’s left-wing, activist politics were never a great fit for the district’s upscale Westchester suburbs, and he would often put his foot in his mouth or his hand on an alarmed door. Will Bowman be the only successfully primaried Squad member this year? AIPAC has its eyes next on Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, whose primary is on Aug. 6.

5. Lauren Boebert

And she would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you meddling—oh, she did get away with it.

Hands-on patron of the arts Rep. Lauren Boebert, who ran for reelection in a new district on the other side of Colorado due to the likelihood of her getting roasted in her current one, successfully pulled off a comfortable primary victory on Tuesday night. She’ll likely be safe for November reelection in the new, redder district covering the eastern half of the state (although never say never). The results, though, speak less to her strength as a politician than a lack of coordination among her numerous competitors. Boebert earned a 44 percent plurality, while her five opponents earned 14, 14, 11, 11, and 7 percent of the vote. In other words, a little collective action to consolidate the anti-Boebert vote behind one candidate could’ve made this a competitive race. But the problem with collective action, at the core of which is self-sacrifice, is its complete lack of fun. And so, the Boeb is back.

6. Matt Rosendale

Did he lose a bet or something?

No one likes Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale, and he’s not returning to Congress. Now, on his way out, he seems focused on losing whatever scintilla of goodwill he had among his colleagues. This week, he introduced an amendment to a spending bill that, in his words, “defunds assisted reproductive technology that includes any infertility treatments or technologies including IVF to ensure human life is protected.” As he put it, “if you are opposed to abortion, you should be opposed to the practice of IVF.” He has gone so far as to decorate the exterior of his office with posters explaining how IVF “destroys more life than Planned Parenthood.” Now, Republican leaders—and the rank and file—and most other conservatives—well, just about every other Republican besides Matt Rosendale—find this pursuit of his to be wildly irritating. Republicans from frontline House members up through Donald Trump have put an awful lot of messaging work into their supposed support for IVF in the face of Democratic warnings that the GOP wants to ban it. Fortunately, the Surge has a solution to all of this: Put Rosendale’s amendment up for a vote. Hey, call it up as a stand-alone bill! Then the rest of the House GOP can vote against it en masse, going on the record to express its love for IVF. Why not? Scared of the Southern Baptists?

7. Warren Davidson

Another castoff on Marjorie Taylor Greene Island?

Exciting internal drama in the House Freedom Caucus this week, on which the (still uncalled!) primary of chairman Bob Good continues to wreak havoc. Ohio Rep. Warren Davidson’s membership in the gang is reportedly hanging by a thread as the Freedom Caucus considers booting him from their ranks. Davidson’s immediate sin was to endorse Good’s primary opponent in Virginia, state Sen. John McGuire, whom Donald Trump and Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had also endorsed. The HFC is determining whether Davidson shall remain a “member in good standing” after his betrayal, which, if he is found not to be, would lower the threshold for his removal from 80 to 50 percent. (The group has an awful lot of bylaws for a glorified treehouse club.) But, as it was with the group’s removal of Greene last year, this didn’t sprout out of nowhere for Davidson. Like Greene, Davidson was a steadfast ally of ex-Speaker Kevin McCarthy who’s channeled the resentment over his ouster into hostility toward his replacement, Speaker Mike Johnson. And, like Greene, Davidson was eager to endorse an opponent to Good, given that Good was one of the eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy. If Davidson is removed—or walks—it will end a chapter of sorts for the Freedom Caucus. The group made its first big splash in 2015 by cornering then-Speaker John Boehner into retirement, and then recruited the successor to Boehner’s House seat—Warren Davidson—into their group. Nothing beautiful can last forever.