“Border czar Tom Homan said he doesn’t care what the judges think about the deportation flights of Venezuelan gang members as the administration faces a legal battle over the flight,” The Hill reports.
Said Homan: “I’m proud to be a part of this administration. We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think. I don’t care.”
“President Trump questioned the validity of pardons granted by President Joe Biden before he left office, signaling that the new administration could move to investigate those given legal immunity by his predecessor,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Any move to investigate or prosecute the individuals pardoned by Biden would mark a significant escalation of Trump’s defiance of longstanding legal norms.”
“Trump asserted early Monday morning in a social-media post that Biden’s pardons were ‘void, vacant, and of no further force of effect’ because they were signed with an autopen.”
“A federal judge is set to press Trump administration lawyers at a 5 p.m. hearing about whether the White House violated a court order in deporting migrants with little to no due process,” the New York Times reports.
“The judge wants to know the location of any flights at the time he ordered a halt to deportations under an obscure wartime law. The White House denied violating the order.”
“In the closing minutes of his podcast, the right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino made a promise. Joining the F.B.I. as its deputy director, he acknowledged, would require a stark change in approach after years of making his name as a pugilistic pundit,” the New York Times reports.
Said Bongino: “I have to stay out of the political space because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the rules. I’m not going there to be some partisan.”
“His arrival on Monday as the F.B.I.’s second in command will test that promise, cementing a major shift at the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, where he will join its director, Kash Patel, in overseeing a bureau of about 38,000 people. It puts two staunch Trump loyalists in charge of an agency long known for its tradition of independence. Collectively, they have the least leadership experience of any pair overseeing the F.B.I. since its founding more than a century ago.”
“Conor McGregor, the mixed martial arts fighter recently found civilly liable for rape back in his native Ireland, is a St. Patrick’s Day guest of honor at the White House,” Politico reports.
Elon Musk claims he found evidence that Democrats spent up to $200 billion on government contracts to “buy” the votes of illegal immigrants to create “one socialist state,” the Washington Examiner reports.
Said Musk: “The fraud we’re seeing is overwhelmingly on the left. I mean, it’s not zero on the right, but these NGOs are almost all left-wing NGOs that are being funded, for example. So, they hate me because DOGE is being effective.”
He added: “The single biggest thing that they’re worried about is that DOGE is going to turn off fraudulent payments of entitlements. I mean, everything from Social Security, Medicare, you know, unemployment, disability, small business administration loans, turn them off to illegals. This is the crux of the matter. Okay, this is the thing, why they really hate my guts and want me to die.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) downplayed any disunity between him and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), saying Sunday that they agree on the “overwhelming majority of issues,” The Hill reports.
Said Jeffries: “Chuck and I agree on the overwhelming majority of issues moving forward, including our effort to oppose the largest potential Medicaid cut in American history. And we’re all going to have to come together.”
“President Donald Trump’s top economic aide on Monday warned of more economic uncertainty stemming from the United States’ evolving tariff agenda,” CNBC reports.
Said economic adviser Kevin Hassett: “Absolutely, between now and April 2, there’ll be some uncertainty.”
“The remark acknowledges what many analysts and business leaders have complained about for weeks, as Trump’s sweeping tariff announcements — and subsequent revisions to them — sow confusion in the markets.”
Don Moynihan: “Right now, the federal government is engaged in a dramatic purging of visual representations of American history and its current workforce. Some of this is a Stalinist removal of former officials. The official portraits of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are gone. An NIH mural featuring Anthony Fauci was removed.”
“More systematically, it also the removal of women, persons of color, and trans people, following executive orders around DEI and gender. Here, the removals signal the end one form of representation that valued inclusiveness and a broader understanding and acknowledgment of people whose stories were not always told…”
“The Trump presidency is, as much as anything, a project of purging and erasing large parts of America, of people, ideas, capacities, and knowledge.”
“Russian propagandists Margarita Simonyan and Vladimir Solovyov enthusiastically praised the US decision to halt funding for Radio Liberty and Voice of America during a broadcast on Russian television,” the Kyiv Post reports.
Federal authorities say they deported a Lebanese doctor holding an American visa last week after finding “sympathetic photos and videos” of prominent Hezbollah figures in the deleted items folder of her cell phone, Politico reports.
Scott Lincicome: “After spending most of the 2024 campaign blaming Democrats for inflation and insisting that tariffs don’t increase prices, Donald Trump and his allies have a new economic message: High prices are good.”
“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, for example, recently admitted to the Economic Club of New York that inflation-weary Americans could see a ‘one-time price adjustment’ from Trump’s tariffs, but he quickly added that ‘access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.’ Representative Mark Alford of Missouri told CNN, ‘We all have a role to play in this to rightsize our government, and if I have to pay a little bit more for something, I’m all for it to get America right again.’ And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick put his own spin on the argument, telling NBC News that, yes, prices on imports will rise, but American-made goods will get cheaper, and that’s what matters. (In fact, tariffs generally lead to price increases for imported and domestic goods, because the latter face less foreign-price competition.)”
“It’s true that affordable goods and services are not, on their own, the definition of the American dream. But they’re a necessary component of it, and trade is one of the most important drivers of that affordability. Until recently, Republicans understood this quite well.”
President Trump praised Jeff Bezos in an interview with Sinclair Broadcasting without any prompting from the interviewer: “I’ve gotten to know him, and I think he’s trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post, and that wasn’t happening before.”
Arlington National Cemetery’s website “has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites,” Task & Purpose reports.
Lauren Egan: “Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s handling of the government funding fight has caused such damage to his standing in the party that even supporters were privately discussing this week whether it represented the nadir of his lengthy political career.”
“It wasn’t because they felt Schumer had erred in shepherding a House Republican-authored bill to passage in the Senate. It was how feeble he appeared to be in the process—a leader in title but not spirit.”
Paul Krugman: “This turn away from military dependence on the U.S. is understandable. America is no longer a reliable ally to the world’s democracies; indeed, between Trump’s turn toward Putin and his talk of annexing Canada and Greenland, we don’t look like an ally at all. Rumors that U.S. jets have a “kill switch” that would allow Trump to disable them at will are probably false, but sophisticated military equipment requires a lot of technical support, so you don’t want to buy it from a country you don’t trust.”
“And this observation got me thinking. How much economic damage will America suffer because it has become a rogue nation?”
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.