“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.
“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.”
“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.
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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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
“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.”
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.”
“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.
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.”
“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.?
“California Governor Gavin Newsom urged President Donald Trump to call on the Texas governor and leaders of other Republican-led states to halt efforts to redraw congressional maps, saying the most populous US state will stand down if they do,” Bloomberg reports.
Said Newsom: “You are playing with fire, risking the destabilization of our democracy, while knowing that California can neutralize any gains you hope to make. If the other states call off their redistricting efforts, we will happily do the same.”
“German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is convening an emergency virtual summit on Wednesday with European leaders, President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” Politico reports.
“The call comes ahead of Friday’s summit in Alaska between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on the war in Ukraine.”
“India is committed to strengthening ties with Ukraine, while calling for a peaceful resolution to its war with Russia, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in a post on X on Monday after a conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky,” Bloomberg reports.
“The U.S. military is preparing to activate hundreds of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., according to a U.S. official, following President Trump’s threats of a federal takeover of the nation’s capital,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“A federal judge in New York on Monday rejected a request by the Justice Department to unseal grand jury transcripts related to the criminal investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted procurer for notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” CNBC reports.
“The Justice Department sought the unsealing of grand jury material related to Maxwell and Epstein after harsh criticism of the Trump administration’s decision not to publicly release the investigative file on Epstein.”
Vice President JD Vance pushed back against criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, accusing Democrats of political opportunism and failing to act when they held power, CNN reports.
Said Vance: “President Trump has demanded full transparency from this. And yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.”
He added: “I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden, so interested in the Epstein files. For four years Joe Biden, the Democrats did absolutely nothing about this story.”
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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