Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week.
Hello and welcome back to the Surge, Slate’s weekly roundup of the newsmaking-est figures in U.S. politics! I’m Ben Mathis-Lilley, filling in for Jim Newell, who has been deployed to far-northern Norway to investigate Russian sabotage attacks and is currently attempting to attach a surveillance device to a walrus. Careful with the whiskers, Jim!
This week, well, it was all about the debate. The debate was pretty big, as a political event, this week. Unfortunately, there were only two participants in the debate and the Surge requires seven entries. How will we get from two people to seven people? You’ll have to keep reading to see! (The Surge heard somewhere that a good piece of writing begins by subtly introducing a question into readers’ minds. Did it work? Was it too subtle?)
1. Kamala Harris
… But will there be a bump?
Well, the sitting vice president got about three-quarters of a best-case scenario out of her Tuesday debate performance in Philadelphia. She looked confident, sounded reasonable, and gave a very strong early answer on her most favorable issue, abortion rights. Most notably, she was able to draw Donald Trump into making most of the night a referendum on his character and fitness for office, during which he seems to have come off to a majority of viewers as unhinged and unfit. So, it was a pretty efficient evening for her. Pundits (including your author) were not sure, though, that Harris’ pitch on the economy—centered on promises of tax cuts for homeowners, parents, and small businesses—was smooth enough to win over the many undecided voters who believe that Republicans are simply better than Democrats at shaking money from the money tree. That’s kind of the one big issue remaining in the entire election, and the polls that will be coming out in the next few days will go a long way toward determining whether this race finishes as the nail-biter that it’s currently shaping up to be.
2. Donald Trump
Stop hitting yourself!
If Harris had three-fourths of a dream debate, Donald Trump had zero-fourths of one. His advisers likely gave him a pair of priorities heading in: 1) mention repeatedly that Harris is part of an administration that many voters blame for the huge recent spike in inflation, and 2) stay calm. But as Trump lost his calm, he also forget to make the case against Harris, spending most of his airtime on defensive, hard-to-parse responses to accusations that Harris was very obviously making in order to goad and distract him—like that people leave his rallies because they’re bored, or that the only reason he’s rich is because he inherited money from his father. Don’t give her all the credit, though: Trump bogged himself down in needless arguments with ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, too. During one of them, he referred to Jan. 6 rioters as “we” and to the law enforcement officers protecting Congress as “the other side.” During another, he admitted that he still hasn’t come up with a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act but claimed that he does have “concepts of a plan,” a novel variation on the dog ate my homework that instantly became a meme. And speaking of dogs …
3. J.D. Vance
You roll in the mud, you end up dirty.
The biggest political news topic of the week was the blatantly racist claim—repeatedly described by local authorities as having no basis in reality—that Haitian immigrants in the Dayton-area town of Springfield, Ohio, have been stealing and eating residents’ pet cats. The accusation has been percolating online for a while, having gotten a big push from members of a neo-Nazi group called “Blood Tribe,” and on Monday, Republican vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance launched it into the national discourse by repeating it in a Twitter/X post about “people who shouldn’t be in this country.” (City officials in Springfield say that in fact most of its Haitian population consists of legal, documented residents.) On Tuesday night, Trump mentioned the cat accusation at the debate, added a claim that dogs in Springfield are also being eaten, and responded to David Muir’s observation that the rumor had been debunked by saying that he had heard it from “people on television.” The exchange appears to have gone over quite poorly with undecided debate viewers, which makes it a nice microcosm of the consequences of elevating Vance—a onetime anti-Trump intellectual who became a nasty, misogynist right-wing media personality in an effort to win over MAGA voters in Ohio—to the ticket in the first place.
4. Laura Loomer
One order of swing-voter kryptonite, coming right up.
A problem with Donald Trump, as a matter of high-level campaign strategy, is that he is an egomaniac who is unusually susceptible to flattery and will effusively associate himself with anyone who says something nice about him, even if that person is, let’s say, the country’s most prominent pro-Nazi livestreamer. Flattery is how J.D. Vance got to be the vice presidential nominee, for instance, and it’s why Trump’s traveling entourage currently includes a far-right online figure named Laura Loomer, a self-described white nationalist who does stuff like posting “jokes” about how Kamala Harris will make the country smell like curry because she’s Indian. (Over the summer, she called a Black member of Congress who had just died a “ghetto bitch.”) Trump likes Loomer, though, because she very vocally took his side against primary challenger Ron DeSantis. So he brought her to the debate, and then he brought her to meet firefighters in New York City on Sept. 11, even though Loomer is (of course) a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. That probably wasn’t the smart play on a day when the cat thing had already put a national spotlight on Trump’s history of amplifying off-putting conspiracy theories. But hey, think about the upside! (There’s no upside.)
5. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi
Another line in the sand?
Last Friday, Israeli forces in the West Bank shot and killed 26-year-old Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a U.S. citizen and recent graduate of the University of Washington. While the Israel Defense Forces initially said Eygi had been participating in a “violent protest,” a Washington Post report found that she was more than 200 yards away from any Israeli soldiers—and that no confrontation between protesters and soldiers was going on—when one of them shot her in the head. President Joe Biden initially brushed off a question about the killing this week by telling reporters that Eygi had been hit accidentally by a bullet that “ricocheted” off the ground, but eyewitness accounts given to the Post suggested that she was struck directly in the head. The White House has since issued statements under both Biden’s and Harris’ names calling the event “unacceptable” and demanding “accountability,” while at a press conference, Secretary of State Antony Blinken further described the shooting as “unprovoked and unjustified.” Will any of this big talk actually amount to anything? Numerous historical precedents, unfortunately, suggest that it won’t. (Biden, by the way, also has a major decision to make at the moment about whether the U.S. will condone long-range Ukrainian missile strikes into Russian territory. He is, for better or for worse, still the president.)
6. Taylor Swift
A different kind of cat person.
Shortly after the debate Tuesday night, the Harris-Walz ticket received the endorsement of a certain Pennsylvania-born singer-songwriter named Taylor Swift, delivered via Instagram to her 284 million (!) followers. Now, all 284 million of those people will probably not vote for Harris, in part because many of them are preteens and/or residents of foreign countries. We’d have a real election fraud scandal on our hands, if that happened. It’s also not a shock that “Tay-Tay” (feeling gross about having written that) weighed in on the race, given that she endorsed Biden in similar fashion in 2020. But it’s not crazy to think the move could have some value in such a tight election, particularly given how important Pennsylvania is as a swing state. Swift shared a link to the federal Vote.gov voter registration website in her Instagram story, and by Wednesday afternoon it had been clicked more than 300,000 times. She also illustrated her post with a picture of herself holding a cat and signed it “childless cat lady” in reference to J.D. Vance’s insulting comments about professional women who don’t have children. Cats, cats, cats! No more items about cats this week, please.
7. The Ominous Worldwide Rumble
It’s probably nothing.
Fun little story in the Washington Post here, let’s see, yes … “The strange rumble was detected mid-September last year.” OK … “A day passed, and the slow tremor still reverberated.” Ha ha … “Scientific stations around the globe” were affected, but experts could find no clear cause—doesn’t seem great … Potential involvement of aliens was “jokingly ruled out,” not sure what’s so funny about that … “No one had ever seen this,” says a man named Kristian Svennevig who works at the “Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland,” exactly the kind of person who you’d expect to be involved in the discovery of frost monsters … And now, according to the so-called “Washington Post,” scientists have concluded that the rumble was caused by global warming in eastern Greenland that loosened a glacier, creating a rockslide that landed in a fjord, which in turn created a tsunami that caused a nine-day “seiche” wave to slosh back and forth in a manner that registered on seismographs around the world. Well, we don’t know how to sugarcoat this one, folks: Climate change has woken up the frost monsters.
