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Washington Post: “Even when everyone is in Washington, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) faces challenges holding his razor-thin majority together in the House. But a spate of absences in recent weeks — some by choice and others by fate — has made it even more difficult to pass legislation, including President Donald Trump’s agenda.”
Said Johnson: “It’s dicey some days. I told everybody … ‘no risk-taking, take vitamins and stay healthy and be here.’”
“The U.S. government has in its possession a device that is believed to cause Havana Syndrome — the affliction that scores of intelligence officers, military personnel, and diplomats began reporting in Cuba in 2016 — according to four sources,” Sasha Ingber reports.
The Pentagon announced Thursday it would take editorial control of independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes to refocus coverage on “warfighting” and remove “woke distractions,” The Hill reports.
“Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado met Thursday with President Trump and presented him with her Nobel Peace Prize, an honor he has long coveted,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“But she emerged with no public backing from Trump, who instead has doubled down on his willingness to deal with stalwarts of the socialist Venezuelan regime rather than press for a democratic transition.”
Washington Post: Machado’s Nobel gamble: A peace offering to win over a wary Trump.
New York Times: “The fatal shooting of Renee Good last week by an ICE agent in Minneapolis — and the quick reaction by Trump administration officials to declare the agent a hero and Ms. Good a villain — has put a new focus on whether federal agents enforcing President Trump’s deportation drive have been properly prepared for confrontations on city streets.”
“The response of Mr. Trump and his top lieutenants to the killing has also underscored how they have embraced what is supposed to be a last resort under the written standards: using lethal force in self-defense.”
“Rather than encourage agents to de-escalate combustible encounters, as the agency guidelines emphasize, Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have provided tacit approval for more aggressive tactics.”
“President Donald Trump met with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday — a rare one-on-one meeting between the two native New Yorkers,” Politico reports.
“The two have shadow-boxed repeatedly over the past year, including on a failed nominations deal and a historic government shutdown, but have had virtually no personal interaction.”
“Trump, according to a statement from Schumer’s office, called the meeting to talk about the Gateway tunnel project, which the administration said late last year would not be funded because of the shutdown.”
“But the Senate leader also used the sit-down to raise two unrelated issues — health care and the administration’s decision to deploy ICE around the country to carry out mass deportations.”
President Trump’s pick for ambassador to Iceland, former Rep. Billy Long, told Arctic Today that he apologizes for comments he made Tuesday about making Iceland the 52nd state with himself as governor.
Said Long: “There was nothing serious about that, I was with some people, who I hadn’t met for three years, and they were kidding about Jeff Landry being governor of Greenland and they started joking about me and if anyone took offense to it, then I apologize.”
Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) “has a word of warning for Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor she just helped to elect: Back off city politics,” the New York Times reports.
“Tension has quietly been growing between the two Democratic allies for weeks over who should succeed Ms. Velázquez in Congress as she retires after 32 years representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens.”
“But Ms. Velázquez pushed it into the open… when she formally endorsed Antonio Reynoso, the progressive Brooklyn borough president, as her successor, and cautioned the new mayor that his decision to campaign for Assemblywoman Claire Valdez, a fellow democratic socialist, could drive a wedge through the coalition that put him in office.”
New York Times: “The companies running online prediction markets, where ordinary people bet on real-world events, can count on intense interest in what President Trump might have up his sleeve…”
“At the intersection of the prediction market industry and Trump world is Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. He is both an investor in and an unpaid adviser to Polymarket, and a paid adviser to Kalshi … That has created questions about whether regulators could have been swayed by simply knowing the interests of the president’s son.”
Jonathan Chait writes that the raid on a Washington Post reporter’s home is deeply troubling.
“The question that has hung over the Post since Bezos’s heel turn has been whether he is still willing to protect the paper from a president who yearns to subdue it. He could answer the question by speaking out forcefully in defense of his journalists and their right to report on the government without intimidation. Or he could continue to remain silent, which, in its own way, is also an answer.”
Michael Scherer: “Now the Democratic Party is trying to decide what type of voters it wants to shape its attempt to regain the White House in 2028. Three years after then-President Biden effectively eliminated the Democratic nominating competition by reordering early contests in his favor, the party’s Rules and Bylaws Committee has invited all 57 states and territories to apply by tomorrow for pole position in the reshuffled 2028 calendar.”
“The result, expected to be announced later this year, will reset the playing field for Democratic aspirants to the world’s most powerful job—and likely anger those who feel cut out.”
“After months of public and private drama, it’s now official – President Donald Trump won’t endorse Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-TX) reelection bid, a serious blow to the veteran Republican’s campaign,” Punchbowl News reports.
“Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who’s been pushing Trump and top White House officials to back Cornyn for several months, said Thursday that the president wouldn’t be endorsing in the race.”
Said Thune: “We’ve tried. And the president obviously is not, at this point at least, willing to make an endorsement there. So maybe at some point that changes. But as of right now, they’re gonna, I think, duke it out in the primary.”
Tom Nichols: “Donald Trump has a lot of odd fixations, both as a person and as a president. He tends to focus his tunnel vision on things he wants: the demolishing of the White House’s East Wing, the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico. Many of Trump’s quirks are harmless, if unpleasant. (He seems to hate dogs, for example, but no one is forcing him to adopt one.) Some of his ideas, however, are more destructive: His stubborn and ill-informed attachment to tariffs has brought about considerable disorder in the international economy and hurt many of the American industries they were supposed to protect.”
“But a few of Trump’s obsessions are extraordinarily dangerous, and likely none more so than his determination to seize Greenland from Denmark, a country allied to the United States for more than two centuries. Perhaps because he does not understand how the Mercator projection distorts size on a map, the president thinks that Greenland is “massive” and that it must become part of the United States. If Trump makes good on his recurring threat to use force to gain the island, he would not only blow apart America’s most important alliance; he could set in motion a series of events that could lead to global catastrophe—or even to World War III.”
“President Trump was advised that a large-scale strike against Iran was unlikely to make the government fall and could spark a wider conflict, and for now will monitor how Tehran handles protesters before deciding on the scope of a potential attack,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Of the two dozen House members over the age of 80 years old, 13 are running for reelection, NBC News reports.
By the end of this year, their average age will be nearly 85 years old. Three will be close to 90 years old.
Jaime Dupree reports the House actually sent the wrong version of the three-year Obamacare subsidies bill to the Senate last week, and had to pass a resolution to quietly get it back.
“U.S. forces seized a sixth oil tanker on Thursday morning,” the Wall Street Journal 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.
