President Trump escalated his war with Harvard University, accusing it of “treating the country with great disrespect,” ABC News reports.
Said Trump: “But Harvard wants to fight. They want to show how smart they are, and they’re getting their ass kicked.”
He added: “All they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper. They’ve got to behave themselves.”
President Trump said he will “take a look at” pardoning a group of men charged with planning to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) in 2020, calling the case — which has resulted in two convictions and two guilty pleas — a “railroad job,” CBS News reports.
Said Trump: “I did watch the trial. It looked to me like somewhat of a railroad job, I’ll be honest with you. It looked to me like some people said some stupid things.”
“OpenAI led a group of American technology giants that won a deal last week to build one of the world’s largest artificial-intelligence data centers in Abu Dhabi,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Behind the scenes, Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup.”
“On a call with officials at G42, an AI firm controlled by the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president, Musk had a warning for those assembled: Their plan had no chance of President Trump signing off on it unless his company xAI was included in the deal.”
President Trump wasn’t happy when a reporter asked him about the “TACO trade” on Wall Street, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, Politico reports.
Said Trump: “Don’t ever say what you say, that’s a nasty question. To me that’s the nastiest question.”
He rejected the idea that his reversals on tariffs amounted to him backing down: “They will say oh he was chicken, he was chicken, that’s so unbelievable. I usually have the opposite problem — they say you’re too tough!”
Garrett Graff: “A lot of attention has come in recent days to the sheer size of the corruption racket surrounding the president and the White House. The New York Times did a great piece this weekend about how Trump is pillaging the presidency, and Evan Osnos — the current reigning king of reporting on oligarchs and the super-rich — this week has a New Yorker piece about ‘Donald Trump’s Politics of Plunder.’ As one lobbyist told Evan, Trump’s influence-selling behavior in office is ‘outer-borough Mafia shit.'”
“But the spreading corruption around the presidency doesn’t stop with the president.”
“There’s also a broader, equally worrisome trend playing out at the margins of the national headlines: Day by day, we’re seeing the Justice Department effectively decriminalize and wave away crimes by Trump’s friends and instead selectively focus investigatory resources on Trump’s adversaries and enemies.”
“This is textbook authoritarianism, a classic example of what one-time Peru president General Óscar Benavides captured in his adage: ‘For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.'”
“President Trump promised to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits. Instead, the House tax-and-spending bill includes a half measure,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The legislation passed by the House last week would give seniors a temporary extra deduction of $4,000, which would lower taxes for many of the people Trump was targeting with his pitch. But this alternative to “no tax on Social Security” would leave many people still paying income taxes on Social Security benefits.”
Nate Silver: “As you can see from the Catalist data, it’s actually common for most dropoff voters to be Democrats: this also happened to the party in 2012, 2016 and 2020. In some sense, that’s a sign of being a victim of your own success. If you’re good at turning out marginal voters, you’re happy to book the win — but they might not vote again next time.”
“In past elections, however, new voters were also Democratic, enough to more or less cancel this out. This time, however, the majority of new voters picked Trump.”
“Put another way, Democrats performed poorly among marginal voters in general: people who don’t read the news that much, and whose political views don’t match the ideologically ‘consistent’ views of strong partisans. Young voters, voters of color, and voters without college degrees are overrepresented in this cohort, all groups that Democrats struggled with in 2024 compared to previous elections.”
Suddenly a lot of people are buying the Blue Wave T-Shirt.
President Trump was asked in the Oval Office about his reaction to Elon Musk’s criticisms of the budget reconciliation bill exploding the federal debt, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “Well, our reaction’s a lot of things.”
He added: “Number one, we have to get a lot of votes, we can’t be cutting — we need to get a lot of support and we have a lot of support. We had to get it through the House, the House was, we had no Democrats.”
Stefany Shaheen (D), the daughter of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), jumped into the open race for New Hampshire’s 1st congressional district, WMUR reports.
“President Vladimir Putin’s conditions for ending the war in Ukraine include a demand that Western leaders pledge in writing to stop enlarging NATO eastwards,” Reuters reports.
“Russia also wants Ukraine to be neutral, some Western sanctions lifted, a resolution of the issue of frozen Russian sovereign assets in the West, and protection for Russian speakers in Ukraine.”
Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R-SC) former staff told Wired they were assigned to create “burner” accounts on social media which were used to bolster Mace’s reputation online.
Said one ex-staffer: “We were congressional staff, and there were actual things we could be doing to help the constituents.”
“The White House plans to send a small package of spending cuts to Congress next week,” Politico reports.
“The planned transmission of the ‘rescissions’ bill, confirmed by two Republicans granted anonymity to describe the plans, comes after a long internal battle over how to formalize the cuts that have been made by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative.”
“The guy’s an asshole. And he’s intentionally an asshole.”
— Chuck Todd, talking to Chris Cillizza about Donald Trump.
Rep. Mike Flood (R-NE) admitted to angry constituents that he hadn’t read President Trump’s “big, beautiful” reconciliation package before voting for it, Rolling Stone reports.
“Flood could barely get through a sentence without facing boos and heckling from the audience. At one point, when asked about a provision in the GOP’s massive reconciliation package that would restrict the judiciary’s ability to hold government officials in contempt, Flood said he did not agree with the provision, before admitting that the ‘provision was unknown to me when I voted for that.'”
“The confession prompted a loud round of jeering from attendees.”
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) has expanded upon his historic Senate floor speech from last month into an upcoming book, the AP reports.
David Frum: “Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.”
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.