We Saw Two Sides of Trump Last Week. Who Knows Which One We'll See This Week.

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Hello and welcome back to the Surge, Slate's weekly real-time effort to write a prequel to the 2024 movie Civil War. I'm Ben Mathis-Lilley, and I'll be filling in until Labor Day for Jim Newell, who has taken a temporary leave of absence after seeing that Donald Trump has installed two 88-foot flagpoles on the White House grounds. 'I'll be danged if I can't make a million-foot flagpole,' Jim said, retreating into his garage, where a great deal of clanging, banging, and typing 'how to build a flagpole' into the YouTube search bar has since been heard. God bless America!
This week we have, well—frankly, we have some bad stuff. The situation is pretty no-good out there, ranging from extrajudicial-ish harassment of elected officials to the senseless murder of elected officials to Kristi Noem having a mysterious medical event. But first: A potential international catastrophe involving nuclear weapons. (I warned you it was all bad!)
Just over a week ago, Israel launched an attack against Iran using missiles, aircraft, and drones. One ostensible purpose of the attack was to set back Iran's nuclear program, which Israel says could soon be capable of producing a nuclear weapon. Another consequence might be the fall of Iran's government. U.S. intelligence analysts, though, disagreed with Israel about Iran's nuclear timeline, and the State Department—which has been conducting ongoing negotiations with the Iranians regarding nuclear issues—said in a statement that the U.S. was 'not involved' in the offensive. Trump, who has now run for president twice on the premise that he is an isolationist who deplores the idea of America becoming entangled in foreign wars, reportedly told Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu that the whole thing was a bad idea. (Because of, you know, the potential to turn the entire country into a civil war nightmare zone that incubates brutal terrorism. Not that the United States would know anything about that.) Thank you, Mr. President?
Not so fast, actually! Just as it seemed the American ship of state was sailing away from Netanyahu's Folly, Trump suddenly demanded Iran's 'unconditional surrender' in a social media post and began musing about having the U.S. drop a bomb on one of its nuclear facilities. He soon explained to the press, directly contradicting his top intelligence adviser, that he's decided the Iranians actually are close to building a WMD—so close that he wants to abandon the negotiation process that he was committed to until a few days ago. What's the deal? As best as anyone can figure out, Trump got so excited about Fox News' war coverage that it made him want to jump in on the whole war thing himself—and, according to the New York Times, he's now started claiming that he was pushing Netanyahu toward attacking the ayatollahs' regime all along. So, as far as whether the United States does or does not currently support Benjamin Netanyahu's effort to destroy the Iranian government … stay tuned! (This kind of uncertainty about what constitutes national policy on a given day, by the way, is not at all unprecedented in the current White House.)
Last Saturday, an estimated 5 million Americans demonstrated across the country at coordinated 'No Kings' rallies. (By the way: This is why the rallies were called that.) It remains to be seen how much this broad activation of liberals, leftists, and people who simply do not like the cut of Trump's jib will translate into political power; the rallies were nonpartisan, and some Democratic officials wary of the possibility that protests could turn violent have kept their distance. That's not true for all Democrats and all expressions of opposition, though. On Tuesday, New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander attended a federal immigration court hearing with the intent of escorting its subject out of the building past Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel. (ICE agents under Trump have begun waiting outside immigration hearings to snatch individuals whose cases get dismissed by judges at the behest of federal attorneys. Lander and others characterize this as a bait-and-switch tactic that deprives individuals seeking legal status of their due process rights.) The ICE agents, several wearing masks and none bearing visible identification, responded by pushing Lander against a wall, handcuffing him, and detaining him for more than three hours on (dubious-seeming) accusations of 'assaulting law enforcement.' (He was released without charges.) It was the third time in the last month or so that an elected Democrat has been manhandled and handcuffed by federal personnel.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in United States vs. Skrmetti, one of the most high-stakes cases of its current term. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision, which states that Tennessee's law prohibiting trans minors from receiving 'gender-affirming' medical treatment is constitutional. The most conservative wing of the court seemed to want to do this while further opening the gates to legalized discrimination against transgender adults across the country. Roberts did not go that far—but in order to walk that line, he had to argue Tennessee's law against receiving medical care that accords with one's gender identity does not have anything to do with gender identity. Trans rights advocates were furious, comparing the ruling to Plessy v. Ferguson, which created the 'separate but equal' doctrine justifying Jim Crow; state-level legislative efforts to strip rights from transgender adults, meanwhile, will continue. As Slate legal eagle Mark Joseph Stern puts it, the Roberts decision is an attempt at compromise that will do nothing to settle the issue, instead inviting more bitter conflict. Sound familiar? Like, say, most of what has happened in American politics since roughly Obama's inauguration?
On Saturday morning, a 57-year-old Minnesota man who acquaintances have described as having right-wing Christian views apparently decided, like so many other Americans in recent years, that he needed to kill some liberals. He then allegedly shot two Democratic state legislators and their spouses in their homes, killing one—state Rep. Melissa Hortman—and her husband. On Sunday, MAGA Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee posted on Twitter/X that the deaths were an example of 'what happens when Marxists don't get their way' (?) and shared an ostensibly humorous (?) meme referring to the shootings as 'Nightmare on Waltz [sic] Street.' (Democrat and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz is Minnesota's governor.) Lee eventually deleted the posts after being confronted about them in Congress by Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith. But this, unfortunately, will probably not be the last time a right-wing elected official's first reaction to a deadly attack on one of his colleagues is to use it as fodder for glib, misleading online juvenilia.
If it seems like this newsletter has been a bit slanted against the Republican Party, that's only because the GOP has been responsible for the bulk of recent headlines; there are plenty of snarky and deeply disillusioned things we could say about Democrats, too, if given the chance! And we do have one good chance this week in the person of Ken Martin, a former DNC vice chair who became head of the Democratic National Committee in February. (Martin, coincidentally, is also from Minnesota.)
The idea behind picking Martin instead of younger, buzzier Wisconsin state party chair Ben Wikler was that he had the kind of longtime insider relationships that would allow everyone in the party to get moving forward quickly without any unnecessary friction or factionalism. Unfortunately, factional friction is pretty much all that Martin has presided over since. His tenure was sent sideways immediately by a controversy over now-former DNC member and Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg's efforts to fund primary challengers against some Democratic House incumbents; this week, news broke that two major labor leaders have resigned their DNC roles over conflicts with Martin whose nature is unclear. This week, Politico and the Times and the Post all published stories in which Martin's various critics in the party dumped on him, mostly anonymously, for being weak and ineffectual. Does any of this matter for 2026? Probably not, given that Republicans are currently pursuing a sort of super-trifecta of unpopular disaster policies. But it does not necessarily give one confidence that the Democratic Party is going to be capable of getting the American national project back on track the next time it holds power.
In the midst of Lander's confrontation with ICE, the fallout from the murders in Minneapolis, and Trump getting all coy and playful about whether or not he is going to have the world's largest conventional bomb dropped on some nuclear stuff, news started circulating that the U.S. secretary of homeland security (Noem) had suddenly been rushed to a Washington hospital. What the hell, we thought. Sometimes we can't even with all of this. It turned out, according to DHS, that Noem had just experienced an 'allergic reaction' (to what, they didn't say) and is fine. Nonetheless: Sometimes we can't even with all of this!