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President Trump spoke to reporters on Air Force One:
REPORTER: Recent reports have discussed the widespread belief that Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski are in a personal relationship. Is that a bad look?
TRUMP: I don’t know about that. I haven’t heard that. I’ll find out about it.
“I have nothing to hide. I have been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein. I have been totally exonerated on Epstein.”
— President Trump, speaking to reporters on Air Force One.
New York Times: “Off and on for months, Mr. Bannon, a leader in the MAGA movement and a former top aide to President Trump, had been advising Mr. Epstein on how to handle resurrected allegations that he was a serial pedophile. Mr. Bannon recommended which lawyers to hire — his own — when to lie low and when he should jump on an opening to push his narrative. He scheduled what the two men called ‘media training.'”
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New York Times: “When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was picked in November 2024 to become the next health secretary, public health experts worried that the longtime vaccine skeptic would wreak havoc on the fragile business of vaccine development.”
“Those fears are beginning to come true, according to executives and investors involved with companies that develop and sell vaccines and the technology that is best known for the Covid vaccines.”
“A proposed constitutional amendment that would give Congress the power to block presidential pardons gained its first House Republican cosponsor on Monday,” Axios reports.
“It’s a stark display of GOP defiance against President Trump, whose pardons have been the subject of bipartisan backlash in several cases.”
“Rep. Johnny Olszewski (D-MD), who is leading the amendment, announced Monday that Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) has signed on as the first Republican co-sponsor of the Pardon Integrity Act.”
“A federal judge, evoking the dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel 1984, ordered the Trump administration on Monday to return a long-standing exhibit on slavery it removed from a popular historical museum in Philadelphia,” CNN reports.
Wrote U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe: “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.”
Washington Post: The Trump administration removed a slavery exhibit. A judge ordered it restored.
“Speculation, particularly among liberal commentators, has started to swirl around possible retirement plans of Justice Samuel Alito,” USA Today reports.
“Alito, the second-longest serving justice and one of the most conservative, joined the high court 20 years ago.”
Aaron Reitz (R), who is Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) endorsed successor, vows to “destroy the left” if elected, the Texas Tribune reports.
Reitz says he is ready, day one, to wage a “civilizational battle with anti-American forces on the left.”
He has fantasized about wearing “OAG emblazoned windbreakers” while raiding any public institution “pushing tranny insanity,” “run out all Kwanzaa-aligned elements poisoning our state” and launch “counter-jihad” against Muslim groups.
Rachel Bade: “Now, about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s much-hyped trip to the Munich Security Conference this weekend. Let’s just say, it didn’t go as planned…”
“Days after her appearance, the New York Democrats’ flubs are still making the rounds on unforgiving social media. It’s a reminder of the high stakes for potential 2028 hopefuls, as Republicans circle like sharks, eager to seize on any misstep to take the opposition down.”
“AOC faceplanted on a question about a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Known for her self-assured swagger and being quick on her feed, she stuttered, visibly squirmed and barfed out a word salad of a response.”
Michigan gubernatorial candidate Anthony Hudson (R) has made a habit of threatening elected officials with hanging for “treason,” making such threats at least twice since the start of 2026, Michigan Advance reports.
In a video posted to social media, Hudson says, “It’s time to get the rope” — while holding a large loop of rope around his arm — as a call to action to “Michiganians and patriots” against politicians.
And at a city council meeting, he said: “You guys never listen, and that’s the problem. These people voted you into office so that you could be their voice in government. When you go against that voice, you commit what we call treason. The punishment for treason is public hanging. So, I suggest you start listening.”
Sarah Longwell: “The past two months have been some of the worst for Donald Trump’s approval rating—ever. Polling aggregators have his net approval in the low 40s, with 34 percent approval on the economy and 30 percent on cost of living. In individual polls, his overall approval dips down into the mid 30s. The last time Trump’s numbers looked this bad was right after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. George W. Bush exited the White House with similar ratings.”
“The slippage is especially drastic with young voters. In the 2024 election, a majority of 18-to-29-year-olds voted for Kamala Harris, but compared with 2020, young voters swung hard toward Trump. According to the Cook Political Report, on March 1, 2025, Trump’s net approval rating with these voters was minus 7. Yet by February 1 of this year, it was an astonishing minus 31.8. Now young people are abandoning Trump faster than any other voting bloc.”
The Guardian: “Jeffrey Epstein sympathized with Brett Kavanaugh during the then-supreme court nominee’s contentious 2018 confirmation and even suggested Republicans should have been harder on Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault.”
“Emails and text messages released by the Department of Justice show Epstein was closely monitoring the confirmation and seemed to believe that Ford’s allegation of sexual assault could derail the process.”
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) said the FBI’s recent Fulton County raid was an attempt by President Trump to suppress Black votes, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports.
Said Ossoff: “He sent them to Fulton County to seize your ballots on a pack of lies. But why Fulton? In part, for the same reason this president posts videos that depict Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.”
He added: “The power of Black voters, and the fact that the power of Black voters ejected him from office, may outrage him more than the defeat itself. And so he tries to delegitimize your exercise of power. With elections approaching, he tries to suppress it.”
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“Among today’s false prophets are the election deniers who indulge this president’s obsession with overturning the 2020 election. Hear me when I say this — they tell a lie so absurd, and therefore so debasing to tell, that the act of telling it proves the teller’s total and humiliating submission.”
— Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), in a campaign speech.
“Long after Jeffrey Epstein was known as a convicted sex offender, he was also a top contributor to an elite cluster of groups founded by Harvard University students,” Bloomberg reports.
“For years, he was able to fill a table with ‘girls’ at an annual gala that featured celebrities, billionaires and cultural luminaries.”
“Annual donations of at least $50,000 to the Hasty Pudding Institute of 1770 — a nonprofit umbrella for a social club, theater troupe and a cappella singers — qualified him as a ‘Guardian of the Sphinx’ at Order of the Golden Sphinx galas in New York from at least 2013 to 2019. His final invitation came just months before he was charged with federal sex-trafficking crimes and then hanged himself in a Manhattan jail.”
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) was interviewed on CNN by Jake Tapper:
TAPPER: How do you feel about the Trump administration trying to send six members of Congress, including two of your Senate colleagues, to prison?
MULLIN: I’m not an attorney.
TAPPER: If the Biden Administration had tried to prosecute Rand Paul for saying things about Covid that they didn’t like, I have a tough time imaging you would say the same thing.
MULLIN: I would say the same thing if I’m not familiar with the case law… I’m not an attorney… Being an attorney has never been something that I want to do.
CNBC: “The recent release by the Department of Justice of millions of pages of documents related to the notorious sex predator Jeffrey Epstein has led to a wave of resignations and other uncomfortable fallout for high-profile people around the world.”
“Those affected include the top lawyer at the major investment bank Goldman Sachs, the CEO of Dubai’s largest port, a former president of Harvard University, a former U.S. president and ex-secretary of State, and the chairman of a leading American corporate law firm.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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