Trump Is Once Again Threatening to Nuke the Economy

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Hey! It's the Surge, Slate's weekly update on what's happening in America's halls of power. Who's slapping backs and calling out nicknames? Who's walking with their heads down hoping not to be noticed? And who's struggling to get a miniature Pringles can out of the flap at the bottom of the halls-of-power snack machine? (The last one is always Pete Hegseth.)

This week we have a tragedy in Texas that potentially could have been avoided, Elon Musk's computer program calling for another Holocaust, and more establishment pushback against the outsider whose radical campaign message of “the cost of living in New York City is too high” has transfixed the rabble. But first: Jerome P. is on the hot seat again.

Jerome Powell

Donald Trump is back to threatening other countries with the imposition of import tariffs that, according to most economists, would cause consumer prices to soar—like, for example, an allegedly imminent 50 percent tax on copper . And that means Trump is back to getting mad at Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve committee that effectively sets interest rates in the US, for saying that tariffs will cause inflation and that, as a result, interest rates need to stay high . Trump wants to cut rates to juice borrowing and spending, and to make the country's GDP numbers go zoom, but pretty much everyone besides MAGA cultists agrees that lowering interest rates with more tariffs on the horizon would be a risky move given that lowering interest rates can itself trigger inflation . The bad news for Powell is that MAGA cultists are in charge of [ checks clipboard ] nearly everything in the country, which means there is now a caucus of Republican senators—the ones from Powell's own party , the party of big business!—hounding him to resign . (Trump is also sending him mean handwritten notes .) The good news is that his term is not up until May 2026 , and Trump has not yet figured out how to fire him .

David Richardson

Last weekend, flash floods in central Texas killed at least 120 people, including dozens of young children who were sleeping at summer camps. (More than 100 more people are missing and feared dead.) How could this happen? One reason might be that the local National Weather Service meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” had just accepted an early retirement package offered by Elon Musk's budget-cutting DOGE group and was not replaced. Indifference to the role disaster preparedness might play in preventing disasters has also been evident in the floods' aftermath. As even Politico's even-keeled environmental-industry trade publication is noting with alarm , Federal Emergency Management Agency interim director David Richardson has not yet visited Texas or made any public statements about the floods. Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported that he has not even brought up the subject at FEMA's morning meetings in Washington . And yes, this is the same guy who told his co-workers he'd never heard of “hurricane season” before taking the job. Great.

“Grok”

Uh, well, so, where to begin? There is this thing in business called artificial intelligence, or AI, a catch-all term that is largely used right now to refer to a specific kind of artificial intelligence program, the large language model, which can be “trained” on previously written material such that it will respond to user questions and statements in the way a real human might. Elon Musk has deployed an LLM, brand name “Grok,” on his X/Twitter service, and instructed his engineers to let it run wild with “ politically incorrect ” answers. And on Monday, shortly after an update to Grok went live, the bot began praising Hitler, flagging users with historically Jewish surnames, and endorsing a second Holocaust . (X's site describes Grok, by the way, as an “AI assistant with a twist of humor.” Comedy is in the eye of the beholder, we guess!)

Why is this political news? Well, because Elon Musk was the largest donor of the 2024 election cycle , and though he has since fallen out with the president and now wants to launch a rival third party , he lasted long enough around the White House to help stuff the administration with people who probably agree with everything the NaziBot said . Vice President JD Vance, for his part, gave a speech this week in which he attacked the Anti-Defamation League , the watchdog group founded amid the surge of anti-Semitic rhetoric and violence that set the stage for Adolf Hitler's rise to power, for identifying domestic white-power extremists as threats to the United States. These far-right individuals, Vance said , “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don't belong,” because their ancestors fought in the Civil War—earning their right to the soil by spilling blood, if you will . Great!!!

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Measles cases in the United States are already at a 33-year-high in 2025, the papers reported this week . With five months still to go on the calendar, there are already 1,288 cases on record. More than 90 percent of these patients are either known to be unvaccinated or did not report having been vaccinated. (Three have died.) One of the leading national purveyors of baloney about the alleged dangers of vaccines, meanwhile, is the secretary of health and human services. (In this house, we don't say “ vaccine skeptic .”) What was he up to this week? Most notably, he was posting on Twitter/X that he was excited about the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (Lee Zeldin) having announced an investigation into contrails , ie, the trails of condensation that you can see in the sky behind planes, which conspiracy theorists believe are secretly laced with chemicals that can change the weather and control our brains . What the hell, man?

Kristi Noem

On Dec. 22, 2001, a goofy-looking al-Qaida enthusiast named Richard Reid tried to detonate explosives he'd jammed into his own shoes on a flight from Paris to Miami. He failed—the FBI has a picture of the shoes on its website—and was sentenced to life in prison. Reid did succeed, though, in terrorizing two decades' worth of subsequent air travelers by inspiring the rule imposed in 2006 that required everyone passing through a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint to take off their own footwear to prove that they are not a shoe bomber. (He was also the subject of one of the Surge's favorite lines in Knocked Up .) This week, Noem—the secretary of homeland security—announced that the shoe policy is no more . “Thanks to our cutting-edge technological advancements and multi-layered security approach,” DHS’s statement says, “we are confident we can implement this change while maintaining the highest security standards.” Hey, whatever it takes. (Noem's next appearance in the Surge will probably not be of the good-news variety .)

Zohran Mamdani

The general election phase of the New York City mayoral race is now underway. Mamdani, the 33-year-old upstart Democratic nominee, will face off in November against scandal-plagued incumbent Eric Adams (now running as an independent), a Republican who is not going to win , and Andrew Cuomo (who is kind of running, but not entirely ). The biggest story in the race this week was the New York Times' “scoop” that Mamdani identified himself as both “Asian” and “Black/African American” on his college application. The story was based on information obtained in a Columbia University data hack and given to a Times reporter by a Twitter/X user who posts obsessively about his belief that Black people are genetically inferior to white people . The paper (and its racist online source) framed the story as a gotcha implying that Mamdani—whose parents are both of Indian descent—tried in a dishonest way to benefit from affirmative action programs that were created to help Black individuals in the US Except that, as the article acknowledged , Mamdani was born in Uganda, and his father —a professor of African studies who gave his son the middle name Kwame as a tribute to the first prime minister of Ghana —came from a family that has lived in Africa for more than 100 years . Kind of sounds like someone who could fairly say that his identity was Indian, African, and American, yes? Oh, and in any case, he didn't get in to Columbia.

Nick Adams

One of the ironically less offensive figures in alpha-male MAGA culture is an Australian-born character named Nick Adams, a writer and online personality whose calls for Chipotle to pay reparations to the “alpha male community” and stories about seeing “stiff shafts” during “foursomes with the boys” on the golf course oust a certain sense of humor and self-awareness. (He never, however, breaks character ). Adams' campaign of full-immersion performance art reached a new level this week when the Trump administration nominated him to be US ambassador to Malaysia. (He became a naturalized American citizen in 2021.) As the Washington Post points out , this is a Real Job: Malaysia is a Muslim-majority country that both the United States and China would like to have on their side economically and geopolitically. It's possibly not the ideal role for someone with no diplomatic experience who has postured as a stalwart supporter of Israeli's war on Gaza . And you know what? It's still a vastly better choice than putting Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of the medical system!