The highlights

• Whether Trump is strategic: "This whole idea that he doesn't know what he's doing, that's stupid. He always has a plan in his head. Now the plan might be impulsive, but he does have some plan. It might not make sense to me or you or whomever, but it isn't like the New York Times led him to water when we were talking to him about Bob Mueller and James Comey and Sessions. He knew what he was doing...What I don't think he always understands is the impact."
• What he's like in person: "He can seem very engaged with whoever he's talking to, even though I suspect he doesn't remember most of what gets said back to him...Dinners with him are said to be pretty short affairs because he loses interest pretty quickly...He just has no attention span."
• On Trump's Twitter: "He doesn't actually really get Twitter...the joke of this whole 'he's such a genius at Twitter', he doesn't actually really understand Twitter. He doesn't surf Twitter. He's not pulling the memes that get used."
• On sourcing within the White House: "A lot of people talk late at night in this administration. There's a real fear for most people that they're being monitored in some way. Some people use different kinds of phones...It has been the case since like Day 20...People are scared."
• On those sources: "The way they talk about this stuff, not all of them, but some of them — it's not about enacting policy or doing what's best for the country. It's winning — winning their little corner of power."
• Do you take his attacks on the press seriously? "Yes, because people don't realize he's playing a game" to get his base to distrust what they're reading and hearing.

In May, the Conservative Action Project released a memo calling for Trump to end the "social engineering" of permitting transgender people to serve and paying for gender re-assignment surgeries. Influential movement leaders wondered what the heck was taking so long, why Defense Secretary James Mattis seemed to be stalling rather than reversing the Obama-era policies.

After an amendment to reverse those policies failed, House conservatives, especially Rep. Mark Meadows of the House Freedom Caucus, started threatening not to vote for the military appropriations bill unless the transgender issues were resolved.

Internally, Rick Dearborn, Marc Short, Steve Bannon and Paul Teller were pushing to overturn the Obama-era policy on transgender troops. Meadows' late intervention empowered Bannon and others to make the point to Trump that the security bill, which included Trump priorities like the border wall, could be derailed unless they handled this issue now.

(This article and headline has been updated.)

The Zika infection occurred in a Hidalgo County resident who had not traveled outside the area, and also did not have any of the other risk factors for Zika infection identified by public health officials monitoring the spread of Zika in South, Central and now North America.

For this reason, the Texas Department of State Health Services said that the infection was "probably transmitted" by a mosquito bite in South Texas. Further lab tests showed that the Hidalgo County resident was no longer at risk of spreading the virus via mosquito populations.

Texas health officials began increased Zika testing of pregnant women and people with Zika-like symptoms in six South Texas counties this past spring. (There were six locally-transmitted Zika cases in Brownsville last November and December.) The local transmission case announced today was a direct result of that increased testing regime.

What's next: Texas officials said that there is no evidence of ongoing Zika transmission in the state, but the news today will almost certainly lead to even more human and mosquito surveillance testing in the southern part of the state. Local health officials had already been going door to door in South Texas counties to share information about Zika with pregnant women and people with symptoms to make sure they were tested.

A skinny repeal package would most likely get rid of the ACA's individual and employer mandates as well as its medical device tax, although some members are pushing to add more. While these are unpopular provisions — and therefore easy repeal targets — the mandates help balance out the marketplace so premiums don't rise too much.

But some Senate Republicans openly acknowledge they're not thinking of this package as something that could become law; they're viewing it merely as something that can get 50 votes and keep the process going. "I think people would look at it not necessarily on its content, but as a forcing mechanism to cause the two sides of the building to try to solve it together," said Sen. Bob Corker.

The problems:

• Almost every GOP aide I've talked to — both House and Senate — are skeptical that a conference committee will come up with something that can pass the Senate. If the Senate couldn't accomplish this feat itself, the reasoning goes, why would a conference committee that must bridge the gap between Senate moderates and the House Freedom Caucus?
  • "Obamacare replace policy is not making it through the United States Senate at this step of the process," a senior Senate GOP aide emailed me last night, referring to the bill as "Corpsicle."
  • The alternative argument is that going to conference can't hurt anything.
• No one is saying exactly what will happen if and when the Senate passes a skinny repeal package.
  • House aides are saying it all depends what's in it, and Sen. Rand Paul is openly saying he doesn't want a conference committee because it'll probably produce something else like the House or Senate replacement plans.
  • But Mark Meadows, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, says he doesn't support skinny repeal, meaning it probably couldn't pass the House at this point.
• Still, it could be their only choice. As one former Senate GOP aide put it, "What happens if the ping pong ball is over on the House side and that's all that's left?"
• And if this does become law, it most likely causes big disruptions in the individual market — right before the 2018 elections, which are already hairy for House Republicans.

What we're watching: Is anyone going to come up with an alternative direction? If not, are any Senate Republicans going to oppose a skinny repeal bill solely because of this lack of clarity about where this is all going? When asked this question, one of the current GOP aides answered, "Nope. Because [Majority Leader Mitch} McConnell has some mystical power to convince people he knows what he is doing."