“Trump doesn’t give two fucks. This is what you’re seeing. He doesn’t care. He didn’t care what they think about what the media think. They were going to put him in prison. He knows this.”

— Steve Bannon, in an interview with Megyn Kelly.

With the Trump administration beginning an investigation into the January 6 prosecutions, former special counsel Jack Smith has retained private counsel, the Wall Street Journal reports.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer applauded President Trump’s sweeping move to freeze federal aid Tuesday morning, calling it a step to shake up the status quo, Politico reports.

Said Emmer: “You’re going to see things like this, and your first reaction is going to be, ‘Well, this isn’t the way it’s been done.’ You need to understand, he was elected to shake up the status quo.”

Karoline Leavitt is slated to hold her first White House press briefing at 1pm ET, the AP reports.

Jonathan Lemire: “Trump’s ubiquity is also a deliberate strategy, several of his aides and allies told me. Part of the point is to send a message to the American people that their self-declared ‘favorite’ president is getting things done. The person at the Palm Beach meeting and another Trump adviser, who also requested anonymity to describe private conversations, told me that the White House’s flood of orders and news is also designed to disorient already despairing Democratic foes, leaving them so battered that they won’t be able to mount a cohesive opposition.”

“Trump’s actions in his first week have been a mix of signal and noise, of distraction and seriousness. He has taken some defeats. But Trump has succeeded, at least, in creating a stark contrast with the quiet of his predecessor, and in (yet again) shifting the nation’s political discourse back toward him. And compared with 2017, the resistance has been far more muted.”