The one world leader we’d most like to trade for Trump right now.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, Slate’s weekly politics newsletter that needs to seriously ramp up its war crimes, and soon, if we’re going to snag a Board of Peace seat.

This week, oh brother. We’ll just say upfront that there was so much Minnesota/ICE stuff to consider that we decided to not include any of it (this is called “news judgment”), though we would refer you to other excellent Slate content here. We do however talk about the Minnesota Senate race, and observe how Bill and Hillary Clinton are going to jail for a million years (unconfirmed). Plus, an old-fashioned look at Trump’s poll numbers, one year in.

But first, Canada: Can we trade you for Mark Carney??

1.

Mark Carney

What Trump hath wrought.

Most contemporary political speeches are terrible, flattened into pablum and crowd-pleasing safety, delivered by empty vessels, then forgotten within the hour. Yet the address from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a collected and poised former central bank head, will, we fear, be remembered for a long time. While he didn’t mention names, he did speak quite precisely of the recent “rupture” in the world order in which “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” In other words, the great powers—such as the neighbor to which Canada’s economy has been deeply linked for decades—have begun to throw their weight around unreliably and turn on their own partners. That means it’s time for “middle powers,” like Canada or major European countries, to orbit around different suns, to diversify, and to work together outside the restraints of the broken American-led order. We encourage you to read it yourself. (Once you’re done with the Surge—no clicking away!)

This, in a nutshell, is the risk of Donald Trump. While it was good that Trump called off the dogs on a hostile takeover of Greenland—for the moment—in his own Davos address the next day, the damage was already done. You can only threaten NATO, threaten global institutions, threaten or implement tariffs, and threaten the sovereign territory of your allies so much before they’ll deem you an unreliable partner and begin to turn away. It’s just a rational response. Trump has a psychological need—wholly unfixable, at this point—to push buttons and wield power recklessly until it causes a stock market dip, at which point he walks it back. The stock market reverses, but the long-term damage to America’s brand doesn’t.

2.

Donald Trump

How we lookin’ a year in?

Congratulations to everyone for making it a full year through Donald Trump’s second presidency! How many years are left? Eh, counting is for nerds. Let’s review how Trump’s political standing has changed over the past year. If you’ll recall, Trump’s favorability rating down the stretch of the 2024 election and leading into his inauguration was the highest it had ever been. That revealed new strengths about his second coalition, as it had made great strides with previously Democratic constituencies like young people and nonwhite voters.

One very exciting year later, all of that is back in the dumps. His job approval is lousy, hovering just north of 40 percent on average. And, as a New York Times/Siena poll this week demonstrated, much of that hemorrhaging support comes from the new blocs of voters he had acquired last year. Nearly 70 percent of registered voters under 30 disapprove of Trump, along with nearly 60 percent of Hispanic voters. Democrats, meanwhile, lead the generic congressional midterm ballot by 5 points—something that’s about in line with the polling average leading into this fall. This is in spite of Democrats, still, being historically loathed. Democrats will have to fix themselves ahead of 2028. (Who knows how!) But the midterms will primarily be a referendum on Trump, and it’s shaping into a horror story for the GOP. Trump’s reaction to the NYT poll was to threaten legal action against the Times.

3.

Bill Cassidy

All of his sucking up to Trump ended exactly how you thought it would.

Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy voted to convict Trump during his 2021 impeachment trial. This made political life challenging for Cassidy after Trump retook the presidency. To succeed in the 2026 primary in his solid red state, Cassidy would need Trump’s support, or at least his neutrality. So Cassidy spent the past year as one of Trump’s biggest cheerleaders. Even when he had a chance to block the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose overt agenda was to destroy everything Cassidy had learned in his career as a physician, Cassidy held his nose and offered his support.

It was all for naught. Last weekend, Trump urged Rep. Julia Letlow to challenge Cassidy and offered her his endorsement. Reporting suggests this was always Trump’s plan, and he just wanted to get through peak legislating season before he risked alienating Cassidy and his vote. Cassidy has pledged to remain in the race for now, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee will have his back as it always does with incumbents. But his fate may have been sealed when he cast that impeachment vote. He should wear that as a badge of honor and speak out against the administration more frequently in 2026—though we’re not holding our breath.

4.

Lindsey Halligan

No longer a U.S. attorney. But was she ever?

Last September, Trump forced out a U.S. attorney in the D.C. area who was trying to do his job honestly and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer from Florida, who was willing to defy all career prosecutors’ advice and indict the president’s enemies. She indicted a couple of them—former FBI Director Jim Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James—only to have those indictments tossed out when a federal judge determined in November that Halligan had been illegally appointed to her job. Halligan nevertheless kept showing up to work, as a sort of Schrödinger’s U.S. attorney.

Halligan’s tenure came to an end this week when federal judges humiliated her out the door. A federal judge in Richmond concluded that “this charade of Ms. Halligan masquerading as the United States Attorney for this District in direct defiance of binding court orders must come to an end,” struck her title from all filings, and said the only reason it would refrain from “referring her for further investigation and disciplinary action” was because she “lacks the prosecutorial experience that has long been the norm for those nominated to the position of United States Attorney in this District.” A separate judge, meanwhile, directed the clerk to publish a job listing for Halligan’s vacant role in local newspapers. What do you think, should the Surge apply?

5.

Michele Tafoya

A curious message.

This week, the NRSC announced with great fanfare its latest recruit: former NFL sideline reporter turned conservative political commentator Michele Tafoya will run for the Minnesota Senate seat left vacant by Sen. Tina Smith’s retirement. This effectively closes out the NRSC’s offensive map for 2026, as it plans to contest Democratic seats in Georgia, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Minnesota. Their argument for the Minnesota seat is that Trump came within 4 points of winning it in 2024, and state Democrats have suffered from scandals surrounding mass social services fraud.

Uh huh. The national environment in 2026 is shaping up to be much different than it was in 2024, and those state scandals’ impact on Dems might be offset by the Trump administration’s more recent decision to send in Immigration and Customs Enforcement and, potentially soon, the military to Minnesota. But! At least a quality recruit could force Democrats to spend some cash in Minnesota. So is Tafoya a quality recruit? Time will tell, though her name recognition will be high. Yet we can’t help but be tickled by her initial message. “For years, I walked the sidelines when the stakes were the highest, and that job taught me how leadership really works,” Tafoya’s team wrote in a social media post alongside her launch video. Her qualification for leadership is that she was quite literally on the sidelines while leadership (in football) was happening nearby. By that logic, we must remind you that the Surge has interviewed former football coach Tommy Tuberville. Do we get a Minnesota Senate seat now?

6.

Bill and Hillary Clinton

Two for the price of one (in jail?)

The House Oversight Committee, which has been conducting its own investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, voted to hold Bill and Hillary Clinton in contempt for refusing to comply with subpoenas to testify. This came after a lengthy back-and-forth between the Clintons’ lawyers and the Oversight Committee about whether the committee’s subpoena was merely an effort to embarrass them, given that the Clintons have already shared what “little information” they know. It’s now a question of whether—when, really—the contempt resolution gets a full House vote, and then whether the Justice Department pursues charges.

Is Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer trying to embarrass the Clintons and turn some of the main-boss energy in the Epstein saga away from Trump? Of course. But what was most catching about the vote was how nine Democrats on the committee joined Republicans to hold Bill Clinton in contempt, while three voted to hold Hillary Clinton in contempt. There’s a couple of political factors at play here. First, Democrats do not want to appear, at this stage in the Epstein saga, to be protecting their own from consequences as they pursue the truth. Second, Democrats pursued quite a few contempt resolutions when they held the House in the Biden years, and giving up on their righteous indignation about the importance of complying with congressional subpoenas wouldn’t smell right. Anyway: Bill and Hillary to serve as inaugural prisoners at the reopening of Alcatraz? (Remember that?)

7.

Tom Cole and Rosa DeLauro

Don’t look now, but Congress is passing actual appropriations bills.

As of Thursday, the House has passed all 12 appropriations bills to fund the federal government, at new levels and reflecting new needs, for the remainder of the fiscal year—and only four months behind schedule, which isn’t too bad! The Senate, assuming senators can ax their way past treacherous ice demons and through the Capitol doors, expects to vote on the final few bills next week. This is the first time since the Biden administration that Congress has passed all new appropriations bills; the government has been running on a series of continuing resolutions, extending old funding levels, since 2024.

So how did this happen? There was bipartisan recognition among appropriators—led by Rep. Tom Cole on the Republican side and Rep. Rosa DeLauro on the Democratic—that they needed to if they wanted to be taken seriously anymore. Passing another CR reflecting old needs, and ceding a proactive congressional power of the purse, would have further emboldened the executive branch and anti-government Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought to do with federal spending as he pleased. “If we wouldn’t have been able to do this, then Congress would have been, frankly, diminished in a way that would have been bad for our republic,” GOP Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart told reporters. Now Congress is back, and the republic is saved!

Remember to salt your steps and walkways, the last thing anyone needs this weekend is a broken neck. Cheers!