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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a politics newsletter that, since its redesign, is looking sharper than Jon Husted’s ass.
We have only two-and-a-half more weeks until these damnable midterms are over, after which all politics will cease and this will become a newsletter about spelunking. Hooray! This week: Donald Trump is so mad about fuel prices screwing up the midterms that he might just give Europe to Russia. A White House press secretary has come and gone since we last wrote, and now she can return to being a lawyer (maybe?). Jon Ossoff said WHAT? There are competitive Senate races WHERE?
But first! It was super PAC donor disclosure week, and you’ll never guess who’s spending the most money this election cycle. (Hint: It’s the guy with the most money.)
Video from Slate
What matters now: The biggest player in the midterms has been hiding in plain sight.
Recall in the spring, during the Texas primary season, the big conundrum that Senate Republicans faced over money. Their concern was that if baggage-laden Attorney General Ken Paxton defeated Sen. John Cornyn for the nomination, the party would have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to (attempt to) rescue him in the fall, money that it could be spending in traditional battlegrounds. Then, after Paxton rode Trump’s last-minute endorsement to win the primary, there was a lengthy standoff between irritated Senate Republicans and Trump’s super PAC over who should foot the bill to rescue Paxton.
The conundrum was resolved around Labor Day. Trump’s MAGA Inc. has put $30 million into the state. But it’s Texas PAC, a spinoff of Senate Republicans’ Senate Leadership Fund, that’s done the bulk of the work, having poured $148 million into the state as of this writing. It both did and didn’t come as a surprise that Senate Republicans so easily let themselves be pushed around by Trump’s operation into cleaning up Trump’s mess. But with third-quarter fundraising filings now coming in, we can see the deal that was struck:
Senate Republicans’ PAC spent the rescue money, but they were just a vessel. The guy really picking up the tab was Elon Musk.
Senate Leadership Fund announced this week that it raised $273 million in the third quarter, with a full $158 million of that—58 percent—coming from Musk. In total, Musk has now given a jokelike $366 million this cycle, making him comfortably the biggest donor of either party. With that $158 million gift to the Senate Leadership Fund, he made months of Republican worries about how to (attempt to!) rescue Paxton look foolish. It was resolved with two checks, two strokes of the pen. No hard decisions over resources would have to be made after all.
For all the attention Musk got during the 2024 campaign and the early part of Trump’s second term, it’s gone relatively unnoticed the staggering degree to which he’s shaping these midterms with his checkbook. That’s not by accident. He’s learned that people want his money but not him.
From the 2024 election through the first few months of 2025, Musk was everywhere: On the campaign trail prancing about onstage with Trump, living at Mar-a-Lago, attending inauguration and inauguration rallies, shredding the federal government apart, fishing around the Treasury Department’s payment system, wielding chain saws at conservative conferences, and trying to win Wisconsin Supreme Court elections. Musk eventually crashed out and receded back to his companies (which were suffering in the stock market during his extracurricular activities) and said he would spend “a lot less” on politics going forward. “I think I’ve done enough,” he said in May 2025. (Over that summer, he and Trump would have a spectacular falling out over social media. They’ve since repaired things.)
Musk, it turns out, has not spent “a lot less” on politics—if we’re talking dollars. He has now spent more on the midterms than he spent to help elect Donald Trump in 2024. He’s just done it more quietly, without attaching the force of his weird personality as a condition. He is not skipping around onstage behind Ken Paxton in Texas. He’s just funding his candidacy. In full. He has taken the most expensive race of the cycle off of Trump, the Senate GOP’s, and the candidate’s plate.
We know it’s ho-hum to observe that there’s too much money in campaigns. But this is really something! Musk has reshaped the midterms with an amount of money that comfortably cruises past any other donor’s contributions this cycle but is effectively less than couch change to him—an amount of money he’s made in the time it’s taken us to write this (run-on, sure) sentence. Is that how our elections should work? Guess it depends on who you ask.
What we’re watching: What other dramatic geopolitical ruptures will occur because Trump is losing the midterms?
For a while now, the Trump administration has been blaming the spike in diesel prices on Ukrainian attacks on Russian refineries. He’s not wrong that it’s a meaningful factor. But it’s an exacerbating factor atop the underlying cause of the Iran war. Trump can’t blame spiking prices on the Iran war, of course, since he was the one who done did it. Laying blame at the feet of the Ukrainians, whom MAGA has been unusually hostile to for years, serves the White House’s political interest heading into the midterms.
And man, does that political interest suck for geopolitics. To spite Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump reached a diesel deal with Russia—just weeks after signing into law a bill allowing the president to tariff the top importers of Russian energy in the hopes of cutting off funding for the Russian war machine. (Trump has yet to announce any self-tariffs.) That indeed did tick off Zelensky, who then ticked off Trump, who said Ukraine needs a new president.
Things have only gotten worse from there. The Ukrainians this week reported a disruption in their access to Starshield, the military-grade satellite network that Ukraine uses for battlefield communications and drone operation—and Reuters reported that the order to do this came from the White House. Zelensky appears to be finished pretending to be nice to Trump and has resumed attacks on Russian energy infrastructure against White House wishes. Say what you will about the guy, but Lindsey Graham’s back-channeling between the two is conspicuously absent right now.
The worse the midterms go for Republicans, the wider the universe of blame Trump will cast. The only thing that’s certain—like, certain—is that Trump will not question whether he, by making extremely optional policy choices that raised the cost of living, contributed to the losses. No, the blame will be cast fully outward, from the inner rings of staff to political consultants, to candidates, to RINOs, to perceived Democratic cheaters. And it will be cast globally, to figures doing what is necessary to save their country from invasion.
What to not stress your little heart about: Who gets to be White House press secretary next week.
As a B-plot for the October of an election year, we might as well have a White House press secretary get hired and fired in the same week. So it went with Katie Zacharia, a member of the broader MAGA extended universe whose two or three public appearances in her new role were bad enough for Trump to ax her on Friday. This was all on top of questions about whether she was actually an attorney, a simple question that she had a difficult time answering.
Who’s up next? Who cares? A lot less attention should be paid to who holds this position and whether they’re “good” at it. Being “good” at White House press secretary means you’re able to not get flustered on live television while spinning terrible news. Assessing them is merely judging a lying contest. Joe Biden’s last press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, got big-time flustered trying to pretend that Biden was not deep into senescence—low marks. Boo! Zacharia’s predecessor, Karoline Leavitt, did not get flustered pretending that Trump was doing a good and coherent job as president—flying colors. Zacharia, meanwhile, received the equivalent of a “see me after class” from the teacher in lieu of a grade. It’s just a parlor game.
More wretched calumny and slander …
• The race in which we’re noticing a modest increase in Democratic alarm is Michigan’s Senate contest. Democrats did, after all, nominate a left-wing candidate in a purple state, and even in this environment, it wasn’t going to be easy getting him across the line. Where the worry has materialized is over his support with Black voters, among whom Abdul El-Sayed performed poorly in the primary. Our colleague Aymann Ismail does an excellent job explaining the nature of the concerns here. And both El-Sayed and Mike Rogers’ campaign decisions show that this softness in the El-Sayed coalition is blinking on their radars. El-Sayed has already campaigned with Kamala Harris in Detroit, and next Saturday, he’ll be campaigning with Barack Obama in Detroit. That’s heavy weaponry for turning out Black voters. And the Rogers campaign is paying more attention to Black voters in Detroit than Republicans typically do. It’s not that Rogers needs big inroads among Black voters. But he does need to maintain that softness for El-Sayed.
• Back to the Texas Senate race: You know, money isn’t everything, although it’s definitely great. But is it serving its intended purpose of saving Ken Paxton? Well, a Truth Social post from Trump about how if Paxton loses, it will all be John Cornyn and Karl Rove’s fault doesn’t indicate that GOP internal polling has Paxton in a great position. (James Talarico isn’t broke, by the way. As it happens, he smashed the single-quarter Senate candidate fundraising record with a reported $64 million haul in the third quarter.)
• How seriously should we take Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff’s pledge from his debate this week? Asked whether he would commit to serving his full six-year term should he win reelection, he responded: “Yes, I will. I have zero interest in running for president. I’m not running for president.” This will come as a disappointment to the many fans that Sen. McDreamboat has picked up as he (probably!) cruises to reelection in a swing state. So can he get out of it? Sure. If he loses the presidential race in either the primary or the general, he will serve his full six-year Senate term, just like he said. And if he wins, then who cares whether those Georgia voters felt lied to—he’s gonna be president! But it’s also worth observing: He may be completely honest about how he has zero interest in running for president next year. Running for president sucks.
• You know how last week we wrote about (a) how Senate control could all come down to Maine and how (b) debates don’t really matter, until the moment they do? It probably would have been best for Troy Jackson, who’s been criticized for hotheaded episodes involving women in the past, to make it through his fourth and final debate against Sen. Susan Collins without telling her to “shut up.”
• Ossoff or No-ssoff, it’s still too early to tell who’ll have a leg up in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, with dozens of candidates seemingly inter—ah, never mind. Indiana county council candidate Jaime West has the nomination locked up.