“The stunning revelation that top administration officials accidentally included a reporter in a group chat discussing war plans triggered furious discussion inside the White House that national security adviser Mike Waltz may need to be forced out,” Politico reports.
“Nothing is decided yet, and White House officials cautioned that President Donald Trump would ultimately make the decision over the next day or two as he watches coverage of the embarrassing episode.”
“Greenland did not invite an American delegation to come visit this week, the self-ruling island’s government said Monday, flatly denying a claim made by President Donald Trump,” Politico reports.
“From an operational security perspective, this is the highest level of fuck up imaginable. These people cannot keep America safe.”
— Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, quoted by The Hill, on U.S. officials sharing war plans with a journalist in a group chat.
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“Postmaster General Louis DeJoy Monday stepped down from his role, pre-empting a decision by President Trump to force him out of the role faster than planned,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Though DeJoy in February had said he would resign, he hadn’t given a departure date and until now had continued to carry out his 10-year turnaround plan for the Postal Service. Trump in recent days had been preparing to fire DeJoy.”
Garrett Graff: “Lost amid the headline-grabbing insanity of the classified details is what the principals were discussing on the group chat. It doesn’t take reading too deeply between the lines to see that the principals weren’t entirely clear on what Trump had ordered — someone, apparently Stephen Miller, says, ‘as I heard it, the president was clear: green light’ — which raises some troubling questions about how much White House staff and Cabinet leaders are interpreting or reading the tea leaves on vague presidential directives or desires. When the president of the United States commits US military forces to operations overseas there shouldn’t be any ‘as I heard it’ ambiguity.”
“Moreover, the principals here were having notably pointed policy discussions in the group chat — which, under a normal functioning government, would be handled at the interagency level by staff and sorted out long before it got a point where the vice president and defense secretary are texting back and forth.”
“The idea that the highest-ranking officials of the US government are just texting each other in the same group chat you use with your college roommates from a decade ago should raise dizzying questions about how policy is being thoughtfully decided and road-tested inside the federal government right now.“
Aaron Blake: Trump’s shocking military plan leak epitomizes a sloppy operation.
“President Donald Trump is cutting nearly $3 billion in spending, much of it reserved for foreign aid, by unwinding part of a 2023 fiscal deal loathed by conservatives,” Semafor reports.
“Trump is slashing from a pot of money deemed emergency spending by the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act, which capped federal spending but also included a side deal criticized by Trump and his allies. One element of the 2023 law’s side deal allowed for more than $12 billion in emergency spending for this year, but Trump is effectively deeming about a quarter of that as outside the scope of any emergency.”
“Boeing is seeking to withdraw an earlier agreement to plead guilty in a long-running criminal case that blamed the company for deceiving regulators before two deadly crashes of 737 MAX jets,“ the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The aerospace giant is seeking more lenient treatment from the Justice Department, which under the Trump administration is reviewing numerous pending criminal cases that haven’t yet gone to trial or been approved by courts.”
“President Trump has selected Susan Monarez, the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to lead the agency permanently,” the New York Times reports.
President Trump told the New York Post that Hunter Biden’s beleaguered former business partner, Devon Archer, will receive a full and unconditional pardon.
Said Trump: “He’s getting a full pardon. He was screwed by the Bidens. They destroyed him like they tried to destroy a lot of people.”
President Donald Trump on Monday said he will soon announce tariffs targeting automobiles, pharmaceuticals and other industries, signaling his plans to pile more sweeping duties on top of his forthcoming “reciprocal tariffs,” CNBC reports.
Police found multiple “incendiary devices” at a Tesla dealership in Austin, the city where the company has its headquarters, Fox Austin reports.
CNBC: FBI launches Tesla threats task force.
President Trump on Monday signaled he may provide exemptions for certain countries when his administration imposes reciprocal tariffs on imports next week, The Hill reports.
Said Trump: “I may give a lot of countries breaks. It’s reciprocal, but we might be even nicer than that. You know, we’ve been very nice to a lot of countries for a long time.”
Senior Trump political adviser Chris LaCivita has filed a defamation suit against The Daily Beast, alleging that the outlet published “malicious” and “damaging” reporting about him during the 2024 campaign “with reckless disregard for the truth,” Axios reports.
“When you ask people, what do the Republicans stand for? They say, ‘well, Make American Great Again, they want to cut the size of government, they want to give tax cuts.'” And what do the Democrats stand for? I think people are kind of scratching their heads a little bit – they believe in choice and LGBT rights – which I believe in those things too – but I don’t know you can build a whole party around that.”
— Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY), quoted by NPR.
“As high-level delegations from the U.S. and Russia arrive in Saudi Arabia for the second round of bilateral talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine, Moscow’s envoys will have one goal on their mind: buying time,” the Moscow Times reports.
“For the Kremlin, dragging out peace negotiations for as long as possible is imperative for seizing as much Ukrainian territory as it can and getting an upper hand over Kyiv in relations with the U.S.”
New York Times: “The Kremlin appears determined to squeeze as many benefits as possible from Mr. Trump’s desire for a Ukraine peace deal, even as it slow-walks the negotiations. Viewed from Moscow, better ties with Washington are an economic and geopolitical boon — one that may be achieved even as Russian missiles continue pounding Ukraine.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told a Cabinet meeting with President Trump: “We are going to eliminate FEMA.”
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg revealed today he had been mistakenly added to a Trump administration Signal chat discussing sensitive military operations in Yemen.
The revelation reads like satire: a prominent journalist suddenly dropped into a private messaging thread where senior national security officials were actively discussing airstrikes.
Goldberg initially assumed it was some kind of elaborate prank designed to embarrass him. It wasn’t.
National Security Council spokesman Brian Hughes confirmed in a statement: “At this time, the message thread that was reported appears to be authentic, and we are reviewing how an inadvertent number was added to the chain.”
But no one should laugh.
The idea that war planning was being discussed over Signal—an encrypted app typically used for personal communication—on unsecured personal phones, has stunned lawmakers and national security veterans alike.
While texting the wrong person is a familiar mistake for many, doing so in the context of war planning raises the stakes to a dangerous level.
And more troubling than the mistaken inclusion of a journalist is the potential exposure of military secrets to adversaries like Russia or China.
National security adviser Michael Waltz even set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after a week. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law since communications about official acts must be preserved.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, didn’t mince words: “This administration is playing fast and loose with our nation’s most classified info, and it makes all Americans less safe.”
“Europe is investing millions in a flurry of newly announced academic programs, in an energetic effort to lure top American scientists across the Atlantic at the same time President Donald Trump casts many U.S. research efforts into turmoil with funding cuts and executive edicts,” the Washington Post reports.
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.
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