“President Donald Trump promised to investigate Fort Knox in Kentucky after Elon Musk made calls to audit gold at the military base,” USA Today reports.
Said Trump: “We’re going to go to Fort Knox, the fabled Fort Knox, to make sure the gold is there. If the gold isn’t there, we’re going to be very upset.”
“I do think that we have had maybe more executive orders than CNN has viewers.”
— Vice President J.D. Vance, at CPAC.
Amy Walter: “The good news for Democrats: Everyone in the party agrees that they are in trouble and in desperate need of a new direction.”
“The party’s favorability ratings are at a record low. The party that was once most closely identified with middle and working-class voters is now seen as the party defending the elites. A recent poll by the Democratic polling consortium Navigator found that a majority of independent voters were more likely to see the Democrats as the party representing the wealthy than standing up for the middle class.”
“The bad news for Democrats is that there’s not an easy or universally agreed-upon fix to their political problems.”
The owner of Politico has praised the “inspiring message” of J.D. Vance’s speech that was met with horror in Europe, as he berated the continent’s politicians for their “whiny” response to the vice-president, the Financial Times reports.
Said Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer: “The fact that most of the Europeans just reacted… in a kind of whiny tone — I think that is unsmart, it’s unstrategic and it’s even dangerous because we need a transatlantic security alliance and we need a transatlantic trade relationship.”
“New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will — for the time being — not remove embattled New York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, but will instead impose limits on his power,” NBC News reports.
“HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is preparing to remove members of the outside committees that advise the federal government on vaccine approvals and other key public health decisions,” Politico reports.
“Kennedy plans to replace members who he perceives to have conflicts of interest, as part of a widespread effort to minimize what he’s criticized as undue industry influence over the nation’s health agencies.”
“Hamas handed over on Thursday what it said were the remains of four Israelis taken hostage during the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including a woman and her two young children whose abduction was widely seen as emblematic of the viciousness of the Hamas assault,” the New York Times reports.
“Crowds of Palestinians gathered near the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis to watch the theatrical handoff staged by Hamas: four coffins placed on a stage in front of a cartoonish, vampiric picture of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Triumphant music thumped in the background…”
“Miles away, Israelis watched the scene unfold in horror and anguish, a sharp contrast to the catharsis evoked by the recent releases of hostages who had survived.”
“The Trump administration has given Ukraine an “improved” draft for a minerals agreement between the countries, after President Volodmyr Zelensky infuriated President Trump by rejecting his initial offer,” Axios reports.
“The Trump administration is moving to terminate a set of protections known as Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants who came to the U.S. while former President Joe Biden was in office,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“The Senate confirmed Kash Patel, a Trump loyalist with a long history of attacking the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to oversee the bureau on a 51 to 49 vote,” the New York Times reports.
“Democrats had hoped to slow or stall the president’s polarizing pick, but ultimately persuaded just two Republicans to join them in voting against Mr. Patel.”
“The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has created a new class of ’emergency’ permits for fossil fuel projects, raising the possibility that pipelines, mines, power plants and other facilities could be fast-tracked for approval as part of President Trump’s demand to increase oil, gas and coal production,” the New York Times reports.
“The move could reduce the opportunities for the public and local officials to weigh in on the effects of proposed projects. It may even short-circuit the National Environmental Policy Act, a 55-year-old law that requires federal agencies to analyze the environmental effects of major projects before they are built. That process can take months or even years, depending on the project’s complexity.”
“Daniel Cameron (R) is wasting no time in his run for U.S. Senate,” the Louisville Courier Journal reports.
“Kentucky’s former attorney general and the Republican candidate for governor in 2023 announced Thursday plans to run for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Mitch McConnell.”
“Cameron, who was the first Black attorney general in state history, came up under McConnell’s wing and has deep ties to the senator, who has emerged in recent years as a frequent foil to President Donald Trump, a fellow Republican.”
Jake Tapper’s new book Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al-Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War traces the extraordinary efforts of American law enforcement officers to gather evidence and build a case that would eventually put a terrorist in prison for life.
Military.com: “The case was essentially a murder investigation. The suspect was in custody, and he’d even admitted to the killings; all investigators had to prove was that he was at the scene of the crime.”
“But the case wasn’t that simple: The victims were two U.S. service members, the crime scene was a remote battlefield in Afghanistan, and the suspect was a self-described al-Qaida terrorist — one who was also about to walk free if prosecutors couldn’t prove their case.”
President Trump is scheduled to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday.
“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values—largely put in place by America since the Second World War—which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity… I love America and was once happy to regard its president as leader of the free world. Not any longer. Where are the American values that I used to admire?”
— Chris Patten, former chairman of the British Conservative Party, quoted by the New York Times.
“Donald Trump wishes he had stuck to his guns and urged Matt Gaetz not to give up his fight to become attorney general,” the Daily Beast reports.
“The president has told aides that he believes Gaetz would have ultimately been confirmed in spite of senators’ concerns about the former congressman’s sexual misconduct allegations.”
Charlie Savage: “The Trump administration is systematically exploiting loopholes to effectively keep much of the president’s blanket spending freezes in place, accounts by officials and court filings show, despite restraining orders from judges who have told agencies to disregard the directives.”
“The administration’s strategy is to have political appointees embedded in various agencies invoke other legal authorities to pause spending, while posturing as if those officials had undertaken the efforts independent of President Trump’s original directives.”
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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