Plus: We learned which members of Trump’s staff matter to him most.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a catering truck clandestinely schlepping you to a world of political knowledge.

We over here at the Surge are trying to have an easy Hot Newsletter August, but wouldn’t you just know it? The politics keep happening. The polls were once again wrong, this time in Wisconsin. We learned whom Donald Trump really wants around him in threatening situations. And Nancy Pelosi is trying to vaporize one last soul, for her legacy.

Let’s begin with institutional Democrats’ Empire Strikes Back moment against the pesky rebels in Wisconsin.

1.

David Crowley

The Democratic establishment still has a few tricks to play.

We shouldn’t call it a shock that Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley defeated democratic socialist Francesca Hong in the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary. Just a week before in Michigan, we’d seen that pollsters were having trouble accurately modeling support for insurgent left-wing candidates. But it was nevertheless impressive that Crowley, with the backing of Gov. Tony Evers, was able to prove double-digit polling deficits and prediction markets completely wrong with his narrow victory. He now has an opportunity to become only the fourth Black person elected to be a state governor in U.S. history. (Seriously: only the fourth.)

Say what you will about the Democratic establishment circa 2026. But it has shown that if someone has trouble answering questions about Thanksgiving, it can still take you down (by a 0.5-percentage-point margin). And while Hong’s defeat will come as a disappointment to Madison, Wisconsin, it will be a relief to most other Democrats nationally. It’s not just that Democrats will have a better—very good, even—chance to maintain the Wisconsin governor’s mansion ahead of another presidential election cycle. This also means that every other Democratic candidate in the country won’t be asked about Francesca Hong throughout the fall. A useful nominee for the GOP has been taken off the table.

2.

Tom Tiffany

Meet Crowley’s opponent.

Crowley will face GOP Rep. Tom Tiffany in November. Tiffany is a conservative member of the House Freedom Caucus, though not one of the attention-hungry ones always causing problems. His principal legislative interest has been to delist the gray wolf as a federal endangered species.

Wisconsin can do whatever it wants with its wolves. Save the wolves, shoot the wolves—none of our business. It is all of our business, though, that Wisconsin, the state that decides presidential elections, have someone who can be trusted to neutrally administer elections. And Tiffany signed an amicus brief seeking to overturn the 2020 elections, voted to object to the counting of Arizona’s and Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on Jan. 6, and said he would have voted to object to counting Wisconsin’s electoral votes were he given the opportunity. He does not, in other words, sound like someone prepared to defend his own state’s election integrity should a Democratic presidential candidate narrowly lead the state after a late-night batch of votes from Milwaukee is tallied.

3.

Donald Trump

Only the true VIPs make the real plane.

This week, we learned about a presidential caper. The Washington Post reported that after last month’s NATO summit in Turkey, the president secretly disembarked from Air Force One into a catering truck, which then took him to a smaller aircraft en route to the United Kingdom. The reason for the switcheroo was intelligence indicating that Iran could try to blow up Air Force One. Nevertheless, it’s unprecedented for an administration to ditch the press entirely for a jaunt like this, then fail to disclose it until it’s reported weeks later.

Many of those on Air Force One, including the traveling press, didn’t appreciate discovering that they had been put on a decoy plane that government officials thought Iran might blow to smithereens. Such is life. What interests us is: Who gets to join Trump in moments like these? We learned that some of the most important administration figures, like Marco Rubio and Scott Bessent, were left behind on Surface-to-Air Missile One. Among those who made it to the cool kids’ plane, meanwhile: Walt Nauta, Trump’s longtime valet; Natalie Harp, the assistant who carries a portable printer on her person to show the president favorable social media posts; and Dan Scavino, an aide going back to Trump’s first campaign who has managed his social media. This is basically Trump’s inner circle of people he’d keep around Mar-a-Lago in those dumpy days after his first presidency when no one wanted anything to do with him. Everyone else? They come, they go.

4.

Peggy Flanagan

How ICE helped a Minnesota progressive win.

In January 2025, 46 House Democrats voted for the Laken Riley Act, an aggressive piece of immigration enforcement legislation that would, among other things, mandate Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention of immigrants arrested for—not even charged with—crimes like shoplifting. This came at a time when many Democrats were still shell-shocked by the substantial role the Biden administration’s immigration record had played in returning Trump to the presidency. Among the Democrats who voted for the bill was Minnesota Rep. Angie Craig.

Craig, a swing-seat Democrat running on electability, lost the Minnesota Democratic Senate primary this week by 20 points to Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a progressive endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Craig’s vote for that bill 19 months earlier is what her loss will be remembered for. Her vote was questionable enough in the moment. But it then became untenable in a Minnesota Democratic primary after ICE’s Operation Metro Surge turned the state—and the country—against the administration’s mass deportation tactics. Flanagan now advances to a general election matchup against Michele Tafoya, a former professional sports sideline reporter. We aren’t expecting Flanagan to have all that much difficulty in a blue year and will likely file this race into our trusty “Probably Not Going to Write About It Again Unless Something Funny Happens” folder.

5.

Nancy Pelosi

One more episode of extreme vengeance against someone who slighted her, for old time’s sake.

Last week, Scott Wiener, one of the two candidates seeking to replace the retiring former speaker in San Francisco, released a chatbot of his opponent, Connie Chan. The Wiener campaign described it as “the world’s first AI trained to say no to anything you ask,” intending to highlight her record on housing, transit, and other issues. Wiener took it down this week, though, after criticism that it came across as racist and/or sexist. Chief among its critics was Pelosi, who supports Chan. Pelosi signed a letter arguing that the bot “reflects a disturbing willingness to erase women’s agency and reinforce the sexist tropes that have long been used to undermine women in public life.”

We’re not saying Pelosi doesn’t believe those words. But what may have most motivated her to condemn Wiener was that it was an opportunity to condemn Wiener. Pelosi has been unusually involved in the race for her successor, rather than letting a contest between two qualified Democrats play out. As Politico reported this week, Pelosi is “unleashing her political machine to block” Wiener by hosting big fundraisers for Chan and lending staff to her campaign. She even called legendary labor leader Dolores Huerta to try to get her to retract her endorsement of Wiener.

Why is Pelosi spending her time this way? We’ve covered her long enough to know a Pelosi revenge campaign when we see one. Wiener announced his candidacy to replace Pelosi before Pelosi had announced her retirement, after years of eyeing her seat, and potentially disrupting Pelosi’s plans to push her daughter Christine for the seat. That is more than enough to get far, far onto her bad side.

6.

Darline Graham

How does Trump play the South Carolina GOP Senate runoff?

South Carolina Republicans held a special Senate primary on Tuesday to replace deceased lawmaker Lindsey Graham on the November ballot. Darline Graham, who has replaced her brother in the Senate for the remainder of the term and has surprisingly chosen to run for a full term, advanced to a runoff against GOP Rep. Ralph Norman, a Freedom Caucus hard-liner who lost the governor’s race earlier in the year. Not making the runoff was Rep. Russell Fry, who probably would have won this thing had Graham not entered the race with Trump’s endorsement. Also not making the cut: former Gov., congressman, and affair-haver Mark Sanford.

We’re interested to see how much Trump leans into his support for Graham in the runoff, scheduled for Aug. 25. Graham earned just 33 percent of the vote, a rather light primary showing for a sympathetic figure emerging from loss who’s campaigning with the president’s endorsement. (The issue may be that those are the only two things anyone knows about her.) Trump might be tempted to lean in hard against Norman, given that Norman was the sole House Republican to endorse Nikki Haley in the 2024 Republican presidential primary. But Trump also doesn’t want to be a loser if that fails. You can already see some hedging in what he’s been saying about the race. On Tuesday night, Trump said that he might campaign for Graham. But he added that he also liked “the other people” running, because “they’re all Trumpers.”

7.

Mike Lindell

Downed pillow.

While we’re at it: Another Trump endorsee did lose this week. Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO and one of the craziest people to grace American politics in the past 10 years (a proper feat), lost the Minnesota GOP gubernatorial primary to state Speaker Lisa Demuth. We don’t know where to start with Lindell—we refer you to this primer on Lindell’s conspiracies from our colleague Molly Olmstead—but it doesn’t get much better than this video of him arguing with a child while “undercover” at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. And yet, Trump endorsed him, and one-third of Minnesota Republican primary voters selected him as their choice to run the state. Demuth defeated him by 11 points.

OR DID SHE? Lindell—who was registered to vote in Texas while he was campaigning for Minnesota governor—obviously has not conceded the race and just as obviously has questioned the integrity of the balloting. Hopefully this is the last we see of Lindell, ever, in politics, but he’ll probably find some way to win the 2028 presidential election. American politics only gets worse, and someday we’ll long for the good old days of Donald Trump. Hahaha. The Surge will be off on vacation next week. Take care!