“House Republicans moved quickly Monday to follow President Donald Trump’s lead as he took unprecedented action to target Washington’s locally elected government — further heightening the GOP’s scrutiny of the capital city and its Democratic elected leaders,” Politico reports.
Summit of Stupidity
Two Grumpy Old Men: “I basically suggested that Witkoff was underqualified. And possibly rather dim. That he simply does not grasp the goals and subterfuge of the former KGB agent residing in the Kremlin since 1999. That Trump’s golf and business buddy was being played. Just like his boss has been for the past seven months.”
“Some of my readers thought that was too harsh. It turned out that, if anything, I was being too nice.”
“Steve Witkoff and his boss have consistently displayed an impressive lack of knowledge of even the most basic tenets of international relations and the war in Ukraine.”
Trump’s Bid to Release Transcripts Was a Smokescreen
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Why the Far-Right Beats the Far-Left
Garry Kasparov: “The far-right positions itself as trying to preserve or restore something, whether some racial-demographic balance or the nation’s bygone glory days. The far-left, by contrast, is seen as trying to disrupt, overthrow—a total departure from tradition.”
“Understood through this lens, we can see why people, against their better judgement, treat MAGA as a safe bet. The writing has been on the wall for years. In 2019, nearly half of all Americans said that the Democratic Party was moving too far to the left, while only 37% felt the Republicans had moved too far to the right (and Trump was two years into his first term at this point!).”
Trump Is Already Meddling in the Midterms
Chris Brennan: “They’re building the machine now to meddle in the 2026 midterm elections 15 months from now.”
“And those machinations are built on two lessons learned from 2020: Attack the election with everything you have before it happens, and stock the Trump administration only with officials who will do exactly what he says on elections, no matter what the law says.”
Mamdani Campaigns Linking Cuomo to Trump
“Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, launched a tour Monday of the city’s five boroughs with a central message linking former Gov. Andrew Cuomo to President Donald Trump,” CNN reports.
Trump Says He’s Going to ‘Feel Out’ Putin at Meeting
“President Trump said on Monday that he plans to use a Friday summit in Alaska to gauge whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is ready to end his war on Ukraine — and said he’d been disappointed in the past in Putin’s actions,” NPR reports.
Said Trump: “This is really a feel-out meeting, a little bit.”
He predicted he would know “probably in the first two minutes” whether a deal would be possible.
Financial Times: How Trump can win in Alaska.
Protesters Gather Near White House
“About 150 people gathered a block north of the White House on Monday as President Trump laid out his plans to federalize the police force in Washington, D.C., protesting what they said was the president’s latest attempt to assert control over the city,” the New York Times reports.
USA Today: Trump warns protesters amid DC crime crack down: “You spit and we hit.”
Trump Extends China Tariff Truce for 90 Days
“President Donald Trump is extending a tariff truce with China for another 90 days, stabilizing trade ties between the world’s two largest economies,” Bloomberg reports.
What Trump Gets Wrong About Putin
Anne Applebaum: “This is not a war for territory. Putin doesn’t need another hundred square kilometers of Donetsk province. His goals are ideological. He wants to to destroy all of Ukraine, to make Ukraine part of a new Russian empire or sphere of influence and to use that victory to undermine NATO and the European Union.”
Mrs. MAHA
Cheryl Hines told the Wall Street Journal she is standing by her husband, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: “We love each other and are still married and whatever we’ve been through is behind us.”
Trump’s Envoy Got It Wrong
Bild: “Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff is said to have completely misunderstood some of the Russians’ statements and misinterpreted them as a concession from Putin. He had misunderstood a ‘peaceful withdrawal’ of the Ukrainians from Kherson and Zaporizhzhia demanded by Russia as an offer of the ‘peaceful withdrawal’ of the Russians from these regions.”
Said a Ukrainian official: “Witkoff doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Daily Beast: Trump envoy’s embarrassing gaffe could blow back on president.
Trump’s Gift to Putin
Heather Cox Richardson: “Putin generally cannot travel outside Russia because he has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, including the theft of Ukrainian children. And yet Trump is welcoming him to the United States of America.”
“This welcome gives Putin the huge gift of letting him touch down on U.S. soil after he invaded Ukraine in defiance of the policy established after World War II to prevent another such devastating war. In 1945 the United Nations charter declared that ‘all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.’ The United States was the key guarantor of this principle until Trump took office.”
John Bolton: “This is not quite as bad, as Trump inviting the Taliban to Camp David to talk about the peace negotiations in Afghanistan, but it certainly reminds one of that. The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow.”
Trump Reminds CEOs Who the Ultimate Boss Is
“In dealing with America’s biggest companies, the commander in chief has no qualms about acting as the micromanager in chief,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“President Trump took his penchant for telling corporate bosses how to run their companies to another level Thursday by publicly calling on Intel’s chief executive to resign. The move wasn’t out of character: Trump has told Detroit carmakers not to raise prices and demanded Walmart “eat the tariffs.” He has pressured the Washington Commanders football team to change its name and wants Coca-Cola to use cane sugar instead of corn syrup.”
“All of that intervention is creating a risk for business leaders who thought they had largely figured out the Trump playbook.”
The Long Reach of the Roberts Court
Adam Liptak: “Taken together, the court’s actions in election cases in recent years have shown great tolerance for partisan gamesmanship and great skepticism about federal laws on campaign spending and minority rights. The court’s rulings have been of a piece with its conservative wing’s jurisprudential commitments: giving states leeway in many realms, insisting on an expansive interpretation of the First Amendment and casting a skeptical eye on government racial classifications.”
Quote of the Day
“This is the sort of thing only the worst populists do in the worst emerging economies.”
— Economist Phil Suttle, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, on President Trump’s dismissal of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The FBI As We Knew It is Gone
Asha Rangappa: “I wish I could say that I think the Bureau can make it through this, as it has other crises and low points in its history. Unfortunately, I’m sorry to say that I don’t think it will, at least in its current form. In fact, precisely because of the ethics and professionalism and independence of the existing cadre of FBI agents, I think that the ones who don’t get fired will quickly leave, because the vetting process ensures that they are people who value their integrity over most anything else.”
“In short, what we are witnessing is the FBI morphing, 117 years later, into the kind of nightmare national police force that Congress and the public feared the Bureau could turn into when it was first created in 1908, and which Director Webster and every other director made their mission not to let happen.”
Trump Puts D.C. Police Under Federal Control
“President Donald Trump announced Monday that he would place the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control and deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington to fight crime and clear the city of its homeless population, an extraordinary flex of federal power that could expose residents of the nation’s capital to unpredictable encounters with a domestically-deployed military force,” the Washington Post reports.
“The decision to deploy troops comes as the president has been slamming America’s cities as places where crime is out of control, despite two years of declines that have brought homicide levels in many major cities to their lowest levels in decades.”
For members: Can Trump Really Take Over D.C.?
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