“He’s a sleazebag. Always has been. He’s a long-timer, and he’s a bad guy. I don’t know anything about the charges, but he’s a bad guy.”

— President Trump, quoted by the Daily Mail, about former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA).

The Economist: “Vice-President J.D. Vance loves big ideas, or at least the idea of big ideas. Unlike President Donald Trump, he reads books and even writes his own, and he talks, authentically, like a diploma-carrying member of the elite they both ostentatiously disdain. He aligns himself with the ‘post-liberal right’, a term so highfalutin one struggles to imagine Mr Trump using it.”

“Mr Vance serves as the chief emissary between the Trump White House and the intellectual ‘New Right’, the agglomeration of pointy-heads, Silicon Valley potentates and podcasters with big ideas of their own for saving Western civilization, as Mr Vance, apocalyptically, likes to describe his mission.”

“It is heady stuff. It must also, on some days, prove vexatious, for it has led Mr Vance to cast himself as the chief ideologist of a movement, MAGA, whose essence is that it has no ideology. MAGA is committed instead to the instincts, impulses and glory of one man. As a result, Mr Vance’s theories of governance keep taking a beating from Mr Trump’s practice.”

New York Times: “A fine arts commission gave preliminary approval to President Trump’s plans for a triumphal arch in Washington, but the panel’s vice chairman suggested significant changes, including losing the statues of golden eagles and a winged angel atop the structure that account for a third of its height.”

“The Commission of Fine Arts, which is filled with Mr. Trump’s appointees, has an advisory role on the design of the project, but no enforcement power. It asked the administration to return with updated drawings before a final vote on the project.”

Washington Post: “A federal judge set new limits on President Donald Trump’s planned White House ballroom, saying construction could proceed only on an underground portion of the project deemed necessary by the military, and not on the 90,000-square-foot above ground addition that Trump has eyed to entertain VIP guests.”

Elizabeth Bruenig: “Donald Trump’s recent outbursts at the pope— ‘WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy,’ he said in one of his Truth Social posts—have renewed questions from observers about the president’s cognitive fitness and his apparently limitless capacity for blasphemy. His attacks also echoed old-fashioned fears about the Vatican as an insidious rival to American power.”

“But more than anything, Trump’s post betrayed a gross and fundamental misunderstanding of who the pope is and what Catholics believe he is empowered to do.”