People Are Actually Standing Up to Trump??

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Oh, great. If it isn't you guys again, clamoring to read Slate's rundown of the week's most important figures in politics. “Who’s up and who’s down?” you say in your nasal, squeaky voices. “Who’s hot and who’s so over?” In this case, in fact, it is I, substitute Surge author Ben Mathis-Lilley, who is over. The original owner of this esteemed newsletter, Jim Newell , will be returning to the helm next week. For our money, Jim is both the funniest and keenest political writer in the United States—which is to say, readers, your long national nightmare is over! The good stuff is coming back!

This week still needs to be reviewed in the meantime, though, so review it we will. And at present, the American government “scene” is quite active even though it involves almost no actual governing. Or, at least, there is very little governing of the constitutionally delineated kind that prior administrations and legislatures tended to engage in. Instead, we just have the now-customary crosscurrents of threats and counterthreats and posturing and bad-faith manufactured outrage that never seem to resolve themselves but are also unmistakably carrying the national project in what even many right-wing partisans probably recognize as an ominous direction. Hell yeah! Let's talk.

1.

Lisa Cook

Lisa Cook is one of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. As such, she gets to vote—independent of the president's wishes—on matters of monetary policy. The most prominent of these is the country's baseline interest rate. Donald Trump wants the rate to be much lower than it is, so people will borrow and spend more money and economic indicators will become “hot” and “buzzy.” Cook is one of the board members who doesn't want to cut rates as quickly as Trump. As such, this week, he accused her of committing “mortgage fraud” and said that he was firing her . His grounds for making the fraud accusation are quite speculative , as is his legal basis for firing an official at an independent agency created by an act of Congress . In response, Cook and the Fed said that she will stay on the job while her alleged termination is litigated, an outcome that is expected to make her way to the Supreme Court. If she loses, the Fed will likely soon be run by MAGA loyalist cranks like the Nazi battleship fetishist Trump is trying to appoint to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In other words, the stakes—much like the Federal Open Market Committee's overnight target rate , in the opinion of the president—are high. Notably, though, if Trump does succeed in removing Cook over the alleged fraud, he will clearly have no choice but to resign himself, having been convicted last year of multiple felonies related to his own falsification of financial records. Any other course of action would be hypocritical!

2.

JB Pritzker

A week ago , we wondered how Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker—who seems to believe he would make a good leader for his party —would react to all the attention California Gov. Gavin Newsom was getting for his goofy but undeniably effective social media campaign against Trump's gerrymandering scheme . Trump then provided a substantive reason for Pritzker to step into the spotlight by threatening to send the National Guard into Chicago. Pritzker responded Monday in the city , surrounded by city and state officials, with a short but to-the-point speech to the effect of, Don't even think about it . (If Newsom's approach is postmodern trolling, Pritzker went with old-timey newsreel grandiloquence: “I say, Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. … If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.”) How Trump proceeds in the face of this resistance will be instructive—simply by giving a speech about the potential for a military deployment, Pritzker has already demonstrated more backbone than the Democratic leaders in the nation's capital have shown in response to the actual occupation of their city . Does the buck stop on Michigan Avenue?

3.

Susan Monarez

Earlier this month, a man who held conspiratorial beliefs about the COVID vaccine attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta with five different guns . He fired more than 100 shots, killing a police officer and then himself. Subsequently, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—the country's leading vaccine conspiracist—issued regulations that will restrict eligibility for receiving the COVID shot . (Kennedy was also in the news this week for claiming he can identify children who have “mitochondrial challenges” by watching them in airports , which is a very normal thing to say.) Monarez, the CDC's recently appointed director, reportedly told RFK Jr. she refused to support the new vaccine restrictions—and, as a result, was told to resign. She refused to do so and was fired . Four other top agency officials then resigned in protest, followed by rank-and-file staffers staging a “walkout” protest . Again, we have to say: This novel new strategy, of people in critical jobs not immediately surrendering to the Trump administration and giving it whatever it asks for … it's provocative, and we're very curious to see where it goes.

4.

The President's Friends in Beverly Hills

Trump, never an especially reliable narrator, is becoming even more untethered in time and space as he approaches his ninth decade—a surrealist poet, of a sort, whose public remarks combine reality and myth in a chronologically liquid fresco of history as emotional truth. (What? Lots of people are saying it.) As your Surge author and the political historian John Ganz both independently noted in recent weeks, the president has started to speak as if the current year is, very specifically , 1989 —and both Slate's and Ganz's observations of the phenomenon were made before he gave Sylvester Stallone an arts award and referred to Saint Petersburg as “Leningrad” in a social media post. This Monday in the Oval Office, Trump delivered another time-travel vignette, telling reporters that he has friends in “Beverly Hills” who leave their cars unlocked so that petty thieves don't rip the doors off when they “go in to steal the radio or whatever.” This type of crime is taking place at “a level that nobody's ever seen before,” he said, adding that he has been “told this by many people, stars, big people.” Car radio theft, needless to say, is no longer a major problem in either Beverly Hills or the US more broadly because most cars do not have discrete radio units anymore . But they sure did when property crime in Los Angeles was cruising along at epidemic levels in 1989 !

5.

Catelin Drey

For Democrats, any hope of containing Trump, let alone rolling back what the party sees as the damage he's inflicted, begins with taking control of the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterms. Sure, it would be great if they could take the Senate then too, and it would be real nice if they could win the presidency in 2028. But all of that will feel mighty unrealistic if they can't even win the chamber in which they have a relative structural advantage in the election cycle that voters typically use to declare that they hate the incumbent president. This week in the Hawkeye State , the party got a good sign about the feasibility of this goal when 37-year-old Catelin Drey, founder of a group called Moms for Iowa, won a state senate election by 10 points in a district Donald Trump won by 11 in 2024. (Your author comes from a Cyclones family himself, by the way. Matt Campbell is one of the best in the game!) Drey, who posted Instagram campaign videos about local topics from what appears to be her front porch , told reporters after her victory that she thinks the issue most critical to her victory was affordability, adding, “I think people right now are desperate to do something that feels hopeful.” Expect to hear a lot more of those themes—and see more of those kind of videos —going forward.

6.

John Cornyn

One of the most enjoyable “ well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions ” situations unfolding right now in politics is taking place in Texas, where longtime Sen. John Cornyn—a conservative Republican who has on the whole been extremely supportive of Donald Trump—is facing a 2026 primary challenge from bongo-brained MAGA superfan Ken Paxton , the state's frequently investigated attorney general, who is also going through a public divorce involving alleged adultery. Why? Because Cornyn has on occasion been mildly critical of the president, having, for example, tried gently to discourage his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. (He then endorsed Trump in 2024. ) This puts Cornyn and the national Republicans who think Paxton would be a weak candidate in the humorous position of arguing that GOP primary voters should be put off by corrupt loudmouths with a history of reckless personal behavior. “Senator Cornyn's support will only grow as voters learn about his proven record — and contrast it with Ken Paxton's disgraceful lack of integrity,” says a statement issued this week by a Republican super PAC whose polling finds Cornyn trailing Paxton by 5 to 8 points . “As Texans learn more about Ken Paxton's incompetence and abuse of power, they will rally behind John Cornyn,” said a statement from another national group. Yeah, sure!

7.

The Old Man on the Cracker Barrel Logo

On Aug. 18, a day that will forever live in infamy, the Cracker Barrel restaurant company announced that it would be changing its logo to be, like, sleeker and more appealing on phone apps or something. This involved removing an image of an old guy leaning his arm on a barrel that was part of the old logo, which ironically made a cohort of young, online right-wing influencers absolutely furious , because, I guess, the old guy was implicitly white, and therefore removing him was “ woke .” On Tuesday, the company acknowledged the backlash and said it would be going back to the old logo, which, admittedly, is a lot more memorable than the generic new one. And with that update on the purportedly reverse-racist branding activities of a chain of pretend country general stores that was founded to capitalize on the growth of the interstate highway system , our summary of the week in US politics (?) is complete. Have a nice fall, everyone!