“The Trump administration has begun detailed planning for a new mission to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to target drug cartels,” NBC News reports.

“The early stages of training for the potential mission, which would include ground operations inside Mexico, has already begun, the two current U.S. officials said. But a deployment to Mexico is not imminent, the two U.S. officials and one of the former U.S. officials said. Discussions about the scope of the mission are ongoing, and a final decision has not been made.”

“Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance have become each other’s primary sounding boards in the West Wing as the pair work together to help shape and execute President Donald Trump’s foreign policy,” Politico reports.

“Rubio — the nation’s top diplomat and Trump’s national security adviser — spends most of his time not at the State Department but inside the White House, where he makes use of the NSA office.”

“Their working relationship, always closely examined, is newly under the microscope this week after Trump again intimated that Vance and Rubio are his two most-likely successors.”

President Trump told reporters that he’s not considering sending long-range Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine — at least for now, the New York Times reports.

Said Trump: “Sometimes you have to let them fight it out.”

New York Times: “Over nearly nine months, the lawsuit challenging President Trump’s attempt to slash foreign aid funding has ricocheted around the federal judiciary but still has not reached a final resolution. It has been reviewed by 21 judges, spawned thousands of pages of filings and lumbered forward even after the administration dissolved the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government office responsible for disbursing much of the contested funding.”