Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, the only politics newsletter that would CRUSH either Joe Biden or Donald Trump and thus, under biblical law, has a claim to the presidency that must be honored. Reader, it was a week to remember, and we’re not even lying this time. A Squad member was primaried out of Congress for the first time.
And yet, Lauren Boebert survives. One Republican is on a lonely quest to screw up his entire party’s messaging around in vitro fertilization. But that’s all back-end stuff, for the suckers and losers.
Let’s begin with the agonizingly consequential debate that America had the misfortune of watching Thursday night. By President Joe Biden turned in a debate performance Thursday night that the Democratic Party is now deciding whether he should be replaced before its August nominating convention. This did not come out of nowhere.
As the Surge has to to limited reception, it was the Biden campaign—not the Trump campaign!—that had to be dragged into agreeing to debate, that trimmed the standard number of debates from three to two, and that moved them up to a more forgettable time in the cycle. And why would they do that? Well, anyone who has tried to watch Joe Biden speak without cards for more than 30 seconds in the past couple of years should have seen that such a performance was well within the range of possibilities. The inability of Democrats to have this conversation earlier has delved the party into panic several months before.
