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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, a newsletter that is to American politics what Brigitte Macron’s hand is to her husband’s face.

Congress was out of town this week, so President Donald Trump and the judicial branch threw a rager in their absence. One court was so disrespectful to Trump’s tariffs regime—rude, frankly—that Trump denounced the conservative legal movement. Also rude to Trump: A reporter who introduced him to an acronym making fun of him. Some people are shamefully begging for pardons, while Joni Ernst is shamefully lobbying for the Grim Reaper’s endorsement.

But first, bye to this guy!

What became of Elon Musk over the last month or two? After being embarrassed in a Wisconsin election and struggling to cloak his displeasure with Trump’s global tariffs, Musk drifted away from full-time Washington work to boost his lousy stock prices. This week, Musk’s official time in Washington was formally severed, and he expressed regret for getting so deeply involved in politics in the first place. The announced exit came shortly after he gave one interview too many, telling CBS that he was “disappointed” with House passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act—OBBBA—and that it “increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.” This was very far from the message the administration is trying to present.

Musk expressed frustration in some exit interviews. “The federal bureaucracy situation is much worse than I realized,” he told the Washington Post. “I thought there were problems, but it sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least.” We’d like to add here: Duh. Next time, he should consider learning how representative democracy works. You cannot waltz in and cancel whichever congressionally appropriated funding or shutter whatever bureau that doesn’t float your boat, calling all those who disagree evil. You have to make a public case and persuade Congress to act. We wish him the best blowing up rockets in the Texas sky and taking his beloved drugs.

The New York–based federal court struck down most of Trump’s tariffs on Wednesday, arguing that the emergency law Trump had invoked—the International Emergency Economic Powers Act—does not confer to the president the “authority to impose unlimited tariffs on goods from nearly every country in the world.” This means that both the “Liberation Day” “reciprocal” tariffs Trump placed on nearly every country in April and the “fentanyl” tariffs he had announced for Mexico, Canada, and China in February would be “vacated and their operation permanently enjoined.” An appeals court temporarily paused the ruling from going into effect the next day.

This will play out in court over the coming weeks and months. And Trump still has other laws he can abuse for certain tariffs. But even if the tariffs were paused for good, something about this win against the dumbest economic decision a president has made in many years still wouldn’t sit right with us. It leaves too many powerful grown men off the hook. Congress can use this as another excuse to wimp out on taking back its tariff authority, which it is obligated to do. The Trump administration can dodge the consequences of its actions, and can blame evil globalist judges once again for not letting True Trumpism be tried. We have little doubt the court’s decision is right—IEEPA certainly wasn’t meant to be used this way—but our leaders are being denied the more bruising education they deserve.

Trump did indeed blame these evil globalist judges for not letting True Trumpism be tried, asking, in a lengthy social media post, “How is it possible for them to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?’ ” The administration has been on the losing end of a lot of court decisions these past few months, but this one snapped something in the president. He ranted about what a mistake it was to use the conservative Federalist Society’s appointment recommendations, saying he was “disappointed” in their “bad advice,” and called its architect for remaking the judiciary, Leonard Leo, “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America.”

Trump has only just begun nominating judges for his second term, and the first handful were fairly run-of-the-mill conservative lawyers. This week, though, he made his most controversial pick so far: Emil Bove, Trump’s former personal attorney who’s served in the Justice Department since the start of the administration, for a circuit court vacancy. You may recall Bove from his role in orchestrating the corrupt pardon of New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a move that prompted numerous prosecutors to resign from the DOJ. He also ordered a purge of Jan. 6 prosecutors and an investigation of FBI agents who worked the cases. He’s widely understood to be unpleasant—but loyal to Trump. We expect this to be the new model going forward. No longer will Trump rely solely on impeccable conservative credentials as presented by the Federalist Society or another outside group. Instead, he’ll turn to his pool of henchmen and try to browbeat them through Senate confirmation.

There’s been a meme (truism?) going around financial circles about the “TACO” trade, which stands for “Trump Always Chickens Out.” First coined by the Financial Times, it refers to the reliable pattern that Trump will always back off of his shocks to the market once the pressure becomes too much. For example: Implementing 145 percent tariffs on China, and then relaxing that because an effective trade embargo between the world’s two largest economies is unsustainable.

Bless the White House reporter who finally asked Trump what he thought about the term this week. “Oh, I chicken out. Isn’t that nice? I’ve never heard that,” Trump began. He told called the question “nasty” and told the reporter, “don’t ever say what you said,” because “that’s a nasty question. To me, that’s the nastiest question.” It may only be a matter of time before the Justice Department announces that usage of this term is a hate crime punishable by death.

Paul Walczak was a nursing home executive who pleaded guilty late last year to charges of using his employees’ withheld earnings to buy a yacht, fancy clothes, and things of that nature. He was sentence to 18 months in the slammer and ordered to pay $4.4 million in restitution. Then his mother—who was separately intimately involved in exposing Ashley Biden’s diary—donated $1 million to have dinner with Donald Trump. Walczak was pardoned a few weeks later. Not great. In fact, some would call this bad.

Trump’s pardons were frequent this week. He gave clemency to an Illinois gang leader, a former governor of Connecticut, an ex–Staten Island congressman, and a tax-fraud reality television couple. If you’re MAGA—and ideally if you put a chunk of money into a Trump fund—a pardon has never been more available. Just look, for example, at the debasement that former Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez, scheduled to report to jail in June, is subjecting himself to. This spree comes as the former interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, “Eagle” Ed Martin, assumes his new role as a pardon attorney at the DOJ. And his message this week? “No MAGA left behind.” It’s all out in the open.

6.

The good ol’ boy life is alive and well in Alabama. Consider Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who this week announced that he would run for governor instead of another term in the Senate. Will he face a difficult primary? Will he have to work? Without even googling, we’re going to guess: No. He’ll be fine. He always is!

Tuberville, a former college football coach, first won his seat in 2020. He went on to achieve very little, and earned his most public attention by holding up military promotions for months at a time. But he slapped a lot of backs, gave a folksy “I’m just a football coach” response when asked policy questions he didn’t understand, and never once questioned Trump on anything. He’d show up for hearings and votes, sure, so long as they didn’t conflict with golf tournaments he was either attending or playing in. It’s unclear whether he spends more time at his modest house owned by family members in Alabama or his $6 million beachfront mansion in Florida, but … given the way we just described the difference between the two houses, is it that unclear? That could make him vulnerable to a residency challenge ahead of his gubernatorial candidacy, but he could always just set the challengers up with some nice football tickets and make it go away. He’ll be fine. Once he’s governor, having won on a platform of getting boys out of girls’ sports, bathrooms, and other girl stuff, he’ll get to play golf six times a week without having to worry about flying to Washington every few days. It’s his destiny.

7.

We’d like to thank the Iowa senator for stepping up at the end of the week to provide us with a solid seventh entry. At a town hall event in her home state, Ernst—who’s up for reelection in 2026 in a state that Democrats, given their limited pickup options, haven’t entirely given up on—was being jeered and heckled by the usual sorts of “TRUMP”-haters and losers, largely about the OBBBA’s proposed cuts. In what was a perfect moment of an elected official losing her patience with the rabble and their slogans, an audience member said that people would die because of the cuts, and Ernst replied, “Well, we all are going to die.” We strongly encourage you to watch the clip, maybe 50 or 60 times like we have. She is so annoyed with these people! Congratulations to the Democrats on securing a clip for the next year and a half of campaign ads; they should be able to cut her winning margin from 11 to 8 now.