We Must Grudgingly Admit That Gavin Newsom Did Something That Worked

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Hello, hello! You’re reading the Surge, Slate’s weekly ranking of the most relevant figures in American politics. Before we get into things, though, we’d like to second the Food and Drug Administration’s advice about not eating the radioactive shrimp that was recalled from Walmart stores this week. It would simply be a bad idea, we believe, to “snarf down” one of the little guys from a bag that may have been contaminated with the cesium-137 isotope in an Indonesian shipping container. No, not even one little nibble, as much as you might really want to find out what isotope shrimp tastes like! What if it tastes really good and you just want more and more, and eventually you can’t fall asleep because you glow in the dark, smell like shrimp, and are dead?

Anyway, this week we have a surprisingly robust amount of news to cover given that it’s late August and Congress isn’t in session. Two of the items are about food—food that’s not radioactive—while another is about a very off-putting idea for a map and yet another is about whether the United States should take advice about democracy from the guy who ended democracy in Russia. (The Surge leans toward “no.”) But first … grudging recognition for Gruesome Gav.

1.

Gavin Newsom

Our general opinion of California Gov. Gavin Newsom is that he is a guy who likes talking and getting attention more than he likes actually governing or thinking about things. He does not necessarily have a set of fixed beliefs about why he’s doing what he’s doing, in other words, but he sure likes the feeling of other people watching him do it. Sometimes, though, his publicity stunts do end up having a real effect on the United States, like when he drove some of the early momentum toward legalizing same-sex marriage by issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples as the mayor of San Francisco in 2004. Now something similar is happening again: In response to Texas Republicans’ push to further gerrymander their state’s congressional districts, Newsom has launched a campaign to enact retaliatory gerrymandering in California—it’ll require a voter referendum in November—that he has for some reason decided to sell by posting like Donald Trump on social media (all caps, being annoying, etc.). And … it’s working. Barack Obama is endorsing his redistricting tactics, the resistance-leading publication the Bulwark is calling him a model for how to handle the current president, California voters are reportedly behind the plan big time … in the Democratic world, it was all Gavin all the time this week. The next question is, how will the party’s other would-be shadow president respond?

2.

The D.C. Sandwich Thrower

On Aug. 11, Trump ordered more than 1,000 National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officers into the District of Columbia in response to what he described, not accurately, as its growing crime and homelessness problem. Crime and homelessness do not appear to have been significantly addressed by the operation, which is heavy on detentions of immigrants who weren’t actively breaking any laws and patrols of tourist areas that were not dangerous to begin with. The most high-profile arrest that the feds have been involved in is probably the detention of Sean Dunn, a (now-former) Department of Justice employee who threw a salami sandwich at a federal officer on the street, ran away, and was hunted down a few days later so he could be charged with felony assault. And now, according to the Washington Post, Dunn and his sandwich have become a folk-heroic image of resistance, the subject of posters and online jokes and tributes at other protests. It really is a good encapsulation of the political moment: a galvanizing and memeable but ultimately childish and ineffectual strike against a regime that is mostly resented by the public but is also not going anywhere anytime soon. Another skirmish, if you will, in the long stalemate. Is anyone else getting hungry (hahahaha) for a different, more constructive kind of political square-off in this country?

3.

John Bolton

On Friday morning, the FBI raided the Bethesda, Maryland, home of Iraq war advocate and first-term Trump national security adviser John Bolton. (He has a modestly sized two-story in a nice, wooded lot, it looks like.) Ostensibly, the search was part of “a long-running investigation into whether [Bolton] mishandled classified information,” as the New York Times put it, but in reality it was retaliation against Bolton for having written a tell-all book in which he described Trump as a deeply corrupt know-nothing dope. Honestly, there’s not a lot more to say about this one: It has troubling implications for democracy, any way you look at it. And also that if you’re considering moving into a home that’s surrounded by trees, you’re going to want to prepare for some significant and frequent service costs.

4.

Vladimir Putin

On the diplomatic track, Trump’s meeting last week with Vladimir Putin—followed this week by a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders—was actually somewhat productive, in that Trump appears to have decided to steamroll both sides of the Russia–Ukraine war into ending their conflict so he can win the Nobel Peace Prize. In other ways, the Putin meeting was less salutary, in that the Russian president made an effort to get on Trump’s good side by telling him that the 2020 election was rigged against him using mail ballots. Needless to say, this is something Trump already believed strongly, but the reminder set him off on a series of social media tirades that culminated in a Wednesday post about passing the Texas gerrymander and getting rid of voting machines (hand-counted paper ballots are less fraudulent, apparently) so that Republicans can pick up 100 seats in the House of Representatives and the “game of politics” in America will be “over.” So … thank you, Vladimir! Thank you for all that you’ve done for the integrity of our elections. (Fortunately, whether the people around Trump do anything to follow through on his ranting is TBD.)

5.

Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie

When Congress reassembles after Labor Day, its agenda will include one of the most sacred duties the Constitution delegates to it as a body: trying to determine why the president’s name apparently appears “multiple times” in documents related to the systematic sexual abuse of teenage girls. That Jeffrey Epstein–related effort will be led by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna in partnership with libertarian Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, who hails from the northern Kentucky suburbs and has become one of Trump’s most hated enemies because he tends to vote against government spending bills and foreign military activity in accordance with his principles rather than rolling over and doing whatever MAGA people want him to do, like the rest of his colleagues. Khanna and Massie have launched what’s called a “discharge petition” to force a House vote on ordering the DOJ to publicly release all the records of investigations into Epstein. While the pair already appear to have enough bipartisan support to force the vote, they also plan to hold a Sept. 3 press conference with Epstein victims to draw more attention to the issue. Could get interesting!

6.

Jason Levin

Up yonder in the Big Apple, Andrew Cuomo is still pursuing an independent campaign for mayor against Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani. (As is incumbent Eric Adams, whose already slim chances in the race took a further beating this week when one of his advisers gave a bag of potato chips filled with cash directly to a reporter, who immediately wrote a story about it.) Cuomo’s new strategy against Mamdani is to post “troll” content about him on social media; one of the memes posted under Cuomo’s name last week was created by a young man named Jason Levin who, on Monday, also posted a picture of himself with the candidate and said he’d be working on “marketing strategy” for the campaign going forward. It turned out, though, that Levin is also a self-proclaimed Trump voter whose online oeuvre includes both references to white nationalist slogans and the claim to be CEO of a company called Goonmaps, which encourages men to post the locations where they’ve masturbated. The Cuomo team now says that Levin is “not paid by the campaign” and that the photo of Levin and Cuomo together was taken at a fundraiser, not a strategy meeting. It did not, however, comment on the map.

7.

Oyster Man

Up even further yonder, in Maine, Democrats are looking for a 2026 candidate to run against Sen. Susan Collins, the squishy-on-Trump moderate who has kept a choke hold on her seat for what seems like 400 years. This week’s entrant into the race is named Graham Platner, an honest-to-God macho oysterman who launched with a well-produced two-minute video about making government work for working people rather than billionaires and “the oligarchy.” While we have no idea whether Platner will make a good candidate against Collins, it does set up an interesting test for the Democratic Party, whose other primary option for the nomination at the moment is 77-year-old current Gov. Janet Mills. How serious is the Dem establishment about trying to appeal to the disaffected younger male voters who helped win the 2024 election for Trump? That’s the question Platner’s campaign is asking, literally. And while editors hate it when writers end a piece by punting and saying “we’ll see,” our professional opinion is … we’ll see!