“President Trump wasn’t planning to attend the recent NRA convention – that is, until he learned that Vice President Mike Pence would be giving the keynote address,” Politico reports.

“That led to a change of plans in the West Wing, according to two people familiar with the arrangement, and nearly a week after the NRA announced Pence would speak, the president was added to the schedule to speak moments after Pence.”

“It wasn’t the first time Trump has changed his plans to one-up the veep. It was originally Pence, not Trump, who planned to travel to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But upon seeing who else would be attending, Trump decided to make the trip himself instead, bumping Pence off the schedule, according to a person familiar with the matter.”

President Trump tweets:

The so-called leaks coming out of the White House are a massive over exaggeration put out by the Fake News Media in order to make us look as bad as possible. With that being said, leakers are traitors and cowards, and we will find out who they are!

Jonathan Chait: “People were already invoking the Republican Party’s rejection of ‘the reality-based community’ and its ‘epistemic closure’ long before Donald Trump took it over. But it has taken Trump to elevate the Republican Party’s reality-altering habits to a level that is literally Orwellian.”

“‘Doublethink,’ as George Orwell wrote, ‘means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.’ Even Big Brother had enough respect for his audience to insist that they had always been at war with Oceania, or whoever they were at war with at the moment. You didn’t see Big Brother calling Oceania his great ally and enemy in consecutive sentences.”

Jonathan Swan: “Once you’ve worked for Trump for a while you know that the worst thing you can do, the biggest show of weakness, is to apologize. He never does and never did (with one exception — the “Access Hollywood” tape). So staff knows that if they publicly apologize they’re actually MORE likely to incur Trump’s wrath than if they just move on.”

Said a senior administration official: “Not apologizing is a core operating principle for Trump. The basic belief is that you never actually get ‘credit’ — from the Left, the media, political opponents, etc. — for apologizing, so why do it? Even the Access Hollywood response video included a defiant Trump going after the ‘actions’ of Bill Clinton and ‘bullying of victims’ by Hillary, and ended with ‘See you at the debate!'”

A new Gallup poll finds President Trump’s approval rate has continued to inch upwards to 43% to 52%.

For comparison, the FiveThirtyEight polling average shows Trump’s approval at 42% to 52%.