“Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s surprise announcement Tuesday ending coronavirus vaccine recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women blindsided the agency that offers that advice,” the Washington Post reports.
“Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are scrambling to understand Kennedy’s decision, announced in a 58-second video on X on Tuesday morning, which took agency staff by surprise.”
“Universities should continue to be able to do research as long as they’re abiding by the laws and in sync, I think, with the administration and what the administration is trying to accomplish.”
— Education Secretary Linda McMahon, on CNBC.
Glenn Kessler: “Given numerous news reports about people dying because they stopped getting American aid, you would think Rubio’s staff would have prepared him with a better answer than ‘lie’ and ‘false.’ His cleanup response wasn’t much better. The issue is not that other nations are reducing funding — but how the United States suddenly pulled the plug, making it more likely that people would die.”
“There is no dispute that people have died because the Trump administration abruptly suspended foreign aid. One might quibble over whether tens of thousands — or hundreds of thousands — have died. But you can’t call it a lie. Rubio earns Four Pinocchios.”
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“The Supreme Court on Thursday limited the scope of environmental reviews of major infrastructure projects in a decision that could speed up approvals of highways, airports and pipelines,” CNN reports.
“The decision is the latest setback for environmentalists at the conservative Supreme Court, which has in recent years shut down regulations intended to protect wetlands, for instance, and reduce air pollution wafting across state lines.”
Original Sin by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson debuted at number one of the New York Times bestseller list.
Louise Aronson: “On the surface, Trump seems stronger and less vulnerable than Biden did. Yet looks do not necessarily reflect risk for illness and disability. A hallmark of advanced age is its variability: One person may be physically powerful but have dementia; another might have hearing loss but no cognitive changes; a third could have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol—physiologic time bombs that increase a person’s risk of major events such as heart attacks, strokes, and death.”
“And Donald Trump has lived in a way that raises his risk for heart and other serious diseases as he ages. For years, he has been overweight or obese, as measured by his BMI—which doesn’t distinguish between lean, muscular weight, and fat, meaning he is likely even less healthy than his abnormal BMI suggests. His gait, though better than Biden’s, demonstrates the same weakness of many lower extremity muscle groups, and his history of eschewing formal, particularly muscle-building, exercise means that his risk for falls and frailty is increasing more quickly than they would with resistance and balance training—recent signs that he might be adopting healthier habits notwithstanding. Equally important, fat on a body indicates fat in and around the body’s critical organs and blood vessels, including the brain and heart.”
Derek Thompson: “Rule No 1 of this administration continues to be: A lot happens under Trump, and a lot unhappens too.”
Related for members: The Resistance Is Working Better Than You Think
“Poland’s knife-edge presidential race has become the latest battleground for the global populist right, with Donald Trump’s allies warning that defeat in Warsaw could sap Trumpist momentum across Europe after recent election losses to moderates in Romania and Canada,” the Financial Times reports.
“One spent more than five years in a U.S. prison for trying to smuggle meth. Another was embroiled in a scandal involving journalists shot dead. At least four have faced investigations for offenses like sexual abuse or organized crime,” the New York Times reports.
“These are just a few of the candidates vying for judgeships and magistrate posts in Mexico’s first-ever judicial elections on Sunday, which are set to transform the nation’s judiciary, including the Supreme Court.”
“Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says his ‘Make America Healthy Again’ Commission report harnesses ‘gold-standard’ science, citing more than 500 studies and other sources to back up its claims. Those citations, though, are rife with errors, from broken links to misstated conclusions,” NOTUS reports.
“Seven of the cited sources don’t appear to exist at all.”
“She’s been very, very successful at a thing called television.”
— President Trump, quoted by Politico, swearing in Jeanine Pirro as interim U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C.
New Republic: “The president’s attack on Big Law is so outrageous that it’s made at least one judge raise his voice, even on paper.”
David Frum: “During his first presidency, Donald Trump collected millions of dollars of other people’s money. He charged the taxpayer nearly $2 million to protect him during the hundreds of times he visited his own properties. He accepted millions of dollars of campaign-related funds from Republican candidates who sought his favor. His businesses collected at least $13 million from foreign governments over his first term in office.”
“When it was all over, Trump apparently decided he had been thinking too small. In his first term, he made improper millions. In his second term, he is reaching for billions: a $2 billion investment by a United Arab Emirates state-owned enterprise in the Binance crypto exchange using the Trump family’s stablecoin asset. An unknown number of billions placed by Qatar in a Trump-family real-estate development in that emirate, topped by the gift of a 747 luxury jet for the president’s personal use in office and afterward. Government-approved support for a Trump golf course in Vietnam while its leaders were negotiating with the United States for relief from Trump tariffs. Last week, Trump hosted more than 200 purchasers of his meme coin, many of them apparently foreign nationals, for a private dinner, with no disclosure of the names of those who had paid into his pocket for access to the president’s time and favor.”
“Russia has gathered 50,000 troops, including some of its most battle-hardened forces, on Ukraine’s northern border for an imminent offensive,” the Times of London reports.
Paul Krugman: “Presumably the Trumpists will try to undo this judgment, one way or another — exploiting other loopholes in the law, maybe trying to bully the Court into submission, maybe just defying the Court altogether. But this is a huge political defeat, and Trump has nobody to blame except his own overreach.”
“You can bet that trade negotiators around the world are snickering, and maybe celebrating with TACOs for lunch.”
Former Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-VA) “is launching her first TV ad of the 2025 Virginia governor’s race, detailing her background as she ramps up her campaign in one of the most closely watched elections of the year,” NBC News reports.
Philip Bump: “Comparing their original sentences with the dates of sentencing and clemency, I calculate that Trump has wiped away more than 700 years of prison time that convicted individuals were otherwise slated to serve. That includes more than 600 years of prison time to which Jan. 6 rioters had been sentenced — including a number of the most violent actors and individuals affiliated with extreme right-wing groups.”
President Trump said he envisions a nuclear deal with Iran that would allow the destruction of “whatever we want” in the country including labs, a version of an inspections regime that is likely to be rejected by Tehran, Bloomberg reports.
Trump briefly outlined his vision of a deal that is “very strong, where we can go in with inspectors. We can take whatever we want. We can blow up whatever we want. But nobody getting killed.”
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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