“President Donald Trump was disappointed in FBI Director Kash Patel’s behavior at the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics and conveyed his displeasure in a conversation with him,“ NBC News reports.

“Patel went viral for his locker-room celebration with the U.S. men’s hockey team after its win against Canada on Sunday — the first time the U.S. team took home gold since 1980. In a video that was first posted by ProPublica, Patel, an avid hockey fan, could be seen chugging a beer and banging on a table, while yelling in an exuberant display of celebration.”

“The Trump administration on Thursday sued five states for voter data, including three governed by Republicans, some of the first red states to be targeted in an escalating effort to seize the personal and private information of voters ahead of this year’s midterm elections,” the New York Times reports.

“The Justice Department lawsuits targeted the Republican-led states of Utah, Oklahoma and West Virginia, in addition to Kentucky and New Jersey. It had already sued 24 states, most of them led by Democrats.”

“The Justice Department said Thursday that it is examining whether it wrongly withheld FBI files that contained allegations against President Donald Trump in its release of millions of pages from the investigatory files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” the Washington Post reports.

“A federal judge has again rebuffed preservationists’ attempt to halt President Donald Trump’s plan to build a massive ballroom atop the site of the now-demolished East Wing of the White House,” Politico reports.

“However, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon left open the possibility that he could still take action to halt the controversial project if opponents reframe their legal claims.”

The FBI, at the direction of Director Kash Patel, has fired at least a half-dozen agents tied to the 2022 search of President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, NBC News reports.

New York Times: “The firings are part of a rolling barrage of retribution aimed at those who worked on the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump after his first term in office. They came hours after Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, told Reuters that as part of the documents inquiry, the bureau had subpoenaed phone metadata for himself and Susie Wiles, currently the White House chief of staff.”

“They are not expected to be the last.”

A new Reuters-Ipsos poll finds 61% of Americans agreed that President Trump has “become erratic with age.”

Just 45% say Trump is “mentally sharp and able to deal with challenges.” 

Wired: “To its audience, Johnny MAGA looked like an independent voice, another outraged supporter in the MAGA media ecosystem.”

“But this isn’t just a regular account. Johnny MAGA appears to actually be a White House staffer named Garrett Wade who works for the Trump administration as a rapid response manager, helping to run the very same White House account his anonymous MAGA account amplifies.”

President Trump’s State of the Union moment calling for lawmakers to stand if they agreed that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens” is already a Republican campaign ad.

Playbook: “The 30-second video shows Republicans standing and clapping for Trump, followed by shots of Democrats fixed to their seats.”

A new Emerson survey of likely voters finds President Trump with a 43% job approval rating, consistent with January, and a 55% disapproval rating, a four-point increase since last month.

Donald Trump’s longest-ever State of the Union address drew 27.8 million viewers across seven broadcast and cable outlets, preliminary Nielsen data showed, a 12% audience drop from Trump’s speech last year, the Hollywood Reporter reports.

“The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against President Trump,” the New York Times reports.

“The materials are FBI memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.”

“The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released.”

“You fat sorry sack of shit, people hate you!”

— James Carville, riffing on Donald Trump for five minutes on his podcast.

Susan Glasser: “You can’t say we weren’t warned. Donald Trump himself forecast the epic length of the State of the Union address that he planned to deliver to Congress on Tuesday evening… When it was all over, he was right about that: at a hundred and eight minutes, the speech easily beat the modern record, which had been set by Trump himself a year ago, for the longest Presidential address to Congress ever. Before Trump began talking, the historian Michael Beschloss noted that the Gettysburg Address was only two hundred and seventy-two words; the President’s speech on Tuesday night clocked in at more than ten thousand.”

“None of them was memorable. For all the blather, it was not only long but incredibly news-free.”

Lakshya Jain: “There is a curious polling phenomenon where a nontrivial share of respondents falsely claim to have voted for the winner of the last election. Whether they’re lying, misremembering, or rewriting history, ‘winner’s recall’ is common enough that many reputable pollsters have observed it in past elections.”

“In our national polling of registered voters, though, we’re finding something different: a nontrivial chunk of people who are mad at Trump seem to suddenly have amnesia and no longer admit to having voted for him in 2024.”

“Voters abandoning the winning candidate is a pretty big reversal of a well-established phenomenon. But we now have enough data to suggest that it’s both real and the direct result of Trump’s unpopularity.”

Paul Krugman: “Well, that was exhausting — or would have been, if I had watched it. But I am not a masochist. I waited to read the transcript.”

“Trump’s State of the Union was historic in at least one respect: It was the longest SOTU ever. Was the plan to turn public opinion around by boring America into submission?”

Playbook: “CNN conducted its regular snap survey of people watching the SOTU — a cohort that (unsurprisingly) this year tilted 13 percent more Republican than the average population. About two-thirds of them liked the speech. But the proportion of viewers who were “very positive” was only 38 percent. That’s a lower score than Trump has registered in any of his previous addresses to Congress.”

“More importantly, it’s lower than for every recent presidency at this point in the cycle”

“It was spectacle as survival strategy,” the New York Times reports.

“In his State of the Union address, President Trump didn’t bother to introduce a raft of new policies — unusual in a midterm election year with control of Congress on the line. He did not seem concerned with making the case that he gets it when it comes to the issue Americans are most worried about. ‘Affordability,’ he said, was part of a ‘dirty, rotten lie’ perpetuated by the Democrats.”

“Instead, with the slashing style of a natural campaigner and the instincts of a onetime reality television producer, he spent the better part of two hours baiting the ranks of incensed Democrats in the chamber and endeavoring to define them to the electorate as ‘sick,’ unpatriotic and utterly out of step with the values of most Americans.”