“Palm Beach International Airport in Florida was formally rechristened President Donald J. Trump International Airport Thursday morning — with the commander in chief’s own Boeing 757 making the first landing,” the New York Post reports.

“Anyone who doesn’t love America is a traitor and beneath contempt. Those who don’t love America, those who are disloyal should be exiled immediately.”

— Elon Musk, on X.

“President Trump on Wednesday achieved his long-awaited ambition of flying on a new Air Force One, thanks to the Qatari government. But his plans for the aircraft’s future might prove much more difficult to get off the ground,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“Trump wants the Boeing 747 jumbo jet to eventually form the centerpiece of his planned presidential library in downtown Miami, similar to Ronald Reagan’s library complex in California that also includes a former Air Force One. He faces numerous obstacles, however, from future presidents who might need to use the jet, Democratic politicians who are determined to stop him and the logistical challenges of cramming the hulking jumbo jet into his planned skyscraper in the middle of a dense city.”

“I don’t even think it’s disputable. I mean, if he had won that election he would’ve been hobbled. He was already pretty unpopular. Covid was raging, inflation was raging. Instead, Biden was the one who ate all of those conditions.”

— Regime Change author Jonathan Swan, on NBC News, on whether losing the 2020 election was the best thing to ever happen to Donald Trump.

“The 250th anniversary of America’s liberation from a king kicked off with a campaign-style rally on the National Mall by President Donald Trump, whose face already stares down from banners fluttering from federal buildings across the nation’s capital,” the Associated Press reports.

“The images illustrate how the Republican president has dominated daily life since returning to power and, to some, evoke more the style of a monarch than the leader of the world’s oldest democracy. But it’s also how he has wielded that power that has led to comparisons of an imperial reign.”

Aaron Blake: “President Donald Trump’s efforts to turn his second term into a big vanity project largely focused on himself are looking increasingly messy.”

“It would be one thing for him to go to such great lengths to build an elaborate White House ballroom and slap his name on buildings in the best of times; but Trump’s timing would seem exceedingly tone deaf, given most Americans are more concerned about their own pocketbooks than honoring a historically unpopular president.”

“And repeatedly in recent days and weeks, the administration’s initiatives have run into roadblocks and its efforts to embellish Washington, DC, (often by skirting the law) have looked rather haphazard.”

NOTUS: “When a former U.S. ambassador reached out to Donald Trump seeking his endorsement for a congressional bid, the president declined. In Trump’s mind, he’d already done enough.”

“The president said he wouldn’t endorse the candidate ever again because, to him, the person would be called ‘honorable’ for the rest of their life. ‘I literally changed your name,’ Trump told the candidate in a conversation.”

“Trump’s stance is indicative of a defining feature of his political view: Loyalty is worth rewarding, but rewards don’t last forever. Changing someone’s name or the physical appearance of Washington does, though, and that’s the defining legacy Trump is focused on.”

“The newly operational Trump Presidential Library, the entity responsible for preserving records from the White House, says that it cannot find a single Twitter direct message sent by a president who tweeted more than 25,000 times during his first administration,” the Washington Post reports.

“President Trump’s presidential library, planned as a gilded glass tower on a donated chunk of Miami waterfront, is designed to be what Eric Trump, the president’s middle son, calls ‘a lasting testament to an amazing man.’ If the president has his way, it will also serve as a monument to his norm-busting conduct in office,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Trump had said that the $1 billion project, the priciest presidential library yet, could include a hotel and retail sales outlets. But more disturbing to historians and government watchdogs is his determination to own and control every document a presidential library would contain. Not since the Watergate era, when President Richard M. Nixon took his fight to control the incriminating White House tapes to the Supreme Court, has a president worked so hard to shield documentary evidence of his administration’s inner workings from public view.”

“The Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the former magazine columnist who accused President Donald Trump of sexual assault,” CNN reports.

“The investigation is focused on whether Carroll committed perjury in testimony tied to her two civil lawsuits against the president – one alleging he sexually abused Carroll in a New York department store in the mid-1990s, and a second for defaming her when in 2019 he repeatedly denied the assault, said she wasn’t his type and claimed she made it up to boost sales of a book.”

Harry Litman: “The American people are being compelled to fund—and by funding to implicitly endorse—a bounty for the people who stormed the Capitol, beat police officers, and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.”

“All of us are, in effect, being conscripted into Trump’s campaign to rewrite the history of January 6th. The message the fund sends—that the rioters were victims, that their convictions were injustices, that the government owes them not accountability but a check—is sent in all of our names, with all of our money. We are being made, without our consent, co-signatories to the biggest lie of Trump’s presidency.”