Politico: “The club, an informal gathering that provides solidarity and networking opportunities in a hostile Washington, is open to what it calls ‘the Team’ — Trump administration appointees as well as alumni of the campaign, transition and inaugural committee. Members wear a lapel pin fashioned after the butt end of a .45 caliber bullet casing and attend semi-regular gatherings that often feature remarks by better-known Trump-world figures such as Brad Parscale, Corey Lewandowski and Anthony Scaramucci.”

“Its operations, described here for the first time, offer insight into how the anonymous foot soldiers of Trump’s Washington have organized their social lives: discreetly, with an eye toward exclusivity and the aspirational lifestyle that has always marked the Trump brand.”

“The White House is moving to do what no president has accomplished since World War II: eliminate a major federal agency,” the Washington Post reports.

“If the Trump administration succeeds at dismantling the Office of Personnel Management, the closure could be a blueprint for shuttering other departments as it tries to shrink government.”

Washington Post: “Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior over the past 12 days — since he first threatened to seal the border in a series of tweets on March 29 — has alarmed top Republicans, business officials and foreign leaders who fear that his emotional response might exacerbate problems at the border, harm the U.S. economy and degrade national security.”

“The stretch also has revealed that a president who has routinelyblamed spiking immigration numbers on others — past presidents, congressional Democrats, Mexican authorities, federal judges, human smugglers — is now coming to the realization that the problems are closer to home. Though his aides have taken the fall, and it is unlikely that Trump will blame himself, the president is facing an existential political crisis ahead of his 2020 reelection bid over the prospect of failure on his top domestic priority.”

New York Times: “In his first 100 days as the president’s acting chief of staff, Mr. Mulvaney has assumed a central role in Mr. Trump’s circle but one markedly different than the previous two occupants of his corner office. For the first time since taking office, Mr. Trump has a chief of staff who has made it his job to encourage rather than restrain the president’s conservative instincts — to let Trump be Trump, in effect.”

“Attorney General William Barr has assembled a team to review controversial counterintelligence decisions made by Justice Department and FBI officials, including actions taken during the probe of the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016,” Bloomberg reports.

“This indicates that Barr is looking into allegations that Republican lawmakers have been pursuing for more than a year — that the investigation into President Donald Trump and possible collusion with Russia was tainted at the start by anti-Trump bias in the FBI and Justice Department.”