President Trump surged immigration forces into Minnesota earlier this month promising "reckoning and retribution." Now he's sounding a rhetorical retreat, Axios' Marc Caputo and Brittany Gibson write.

Why it matters: Saturday's killing of protester Alex Pretti, and the videos showing how Trump's administration misrepresented it, drove the president to uncharacteristically de-escalate yesterday.

• "It's f**ked, and POTUS knew he needed to unf**k it," an administration adviser told Axios.

🔎 Zoom in: Trump's most significant move came yesterday morning, when he dispatched White House border czar Tom Homan to the Twin Cities — and essentially cut Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem out of the shambolic Minneapolis operation.

• Hours later, DHS announced the hard-charging head of the controversial immigration efforts, U.S. Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, would leave the state and return to his old job leading his sector in El Centro, Calif.
• "He's a cowboy, and it was a mess. It was only escalation, and no one was going to back down," a source familiar with the operations said. "Homan going is a good thing. Someone needed to step in."

Behind the scenes: Trump spent Sunday lamenting his administration's botched response to Pretti's shooting, including news conferences by Bovino and Noem in which they seemed "callous" about the man's death, a confidant who spoke with Trump told Axios.

• The White House wants to get the Minnesota immigration operation on solid footing, as Senate Democrats threaten to shut down the federal government this Friday because of the administration's controversial immigration enforcement efforts.
• "So it's Tom Homan to the rescue," the confidant said.

Homan plans to meet with law enforcement, along with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both of whom have accused immigration agents of terrorizing Minnesotans and demanded they leave.

• Trump spoke with Walz and Frey yesterday and struck a new tone of cooperation.
• An administration official said Homan is likely to emphasize more targeted enforcement efforts with fewer confrontational tactics. Bovino's roving squads of masked officers were caught on video accosting residents — including two Target employees, both U.S. citizens, who were roughed up earlier this month.

🖼️ The big picture: Trump wants a peace-with-honor withdrawal from Minnesota that doesn't look like his immigration surge was a loss driven by botched law enforcement efforts under Bovino, and plummeting poll numbers.

• The administration wants Minnesota law enforcement to help with traffic and crowd control, so DHS can make immigration arrests without interference from the well-organized protesters in the Twin Cities.
• Three people have been shot by federal agents in Minneapolis this month, including two fatally — Pretti and Renee Good.

🥊 Reality check: Trump has made friendly calls and peace offerings to Minnesota officials, but he's not going to pack up and leave the state.

• "We can't lose Minneapolis because if we do, we lose Chicago and Los Angeles," an administration adviser said.

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We scrambled the debut of our "Behind the Curtain" video series: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wanted to chat yesterday after he dropped a 38-page essay warning of escalating risks from the AI technology he's helping pioneer.

• We asked Amodei, in San Francisco, what Congress should do now, and what lawmakers should tell their constituents. His three-part prescription:

1. Transparency legislation to require AI companies to disclose their models' risks and bad behavior, and the defenses that are built in.
2. Cut off sales of Nvidia chips and other U.S. products that help China.
3. Get ready to tax future AI trillionaires and redistribute wealth. He said he'd tell his fellow future trillionaires: "You're going to get a mob coming for you if you don't do this in the right way."

The bottom line: "We always assume that everything that can go wrong does go wrong," Amodei said. "That's how you build things that are reliable."

👉 Watch it here ... Executive producer: Axios' Jimmy Shelton.

President Trump and his orbit have become increasingly angry with Sen. Josh Hawley, miffed by moves the Missouri Republican has made in laying the groundwork for a possible 2028 bid for president, Axios' Alex Isenstadt writes.

• Why it matters: Hawley, once a key Trump ally on the Hill, has shown a willingness to break with the White House — rare among Republicans — on issues from abortion to presidential war powers.

It's a stunning turnabout for Hawley, who objected to certifying Trump's 2020 election defeat and was famously pictured raising his fist in solidarity with Jan. 6 rioters before they assaulted the U.S. Capitol.

• "Hawley has turned out to be a major disappointment as of late," said Alex Bruesewitz, a top pro-Trump social media influencer.

🔬 Zoom in: Hawley has split with Trump repeatedly in the president's second term — including earlier this month, when he (briefly) joined Democrats in supporting a limit on Trump's military authority in Venezuela.

• Trump allies closely monitoring Hawley's moves point to more than a half-dozen other episodes in which he's broken with the president.

👀 The intrigue: Trump's now swinging back. He posted on social media that Hawley and other Republican senators who supported the measure to limit the president's war powers "should never be elected to office again." Trump last year called Hawley a "second-tier senator" after the senator backed a proposed stock-trading ban for lawmakers.

• A Hawley spokesperson declined to comment.

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Temperatures could fall 20°F (or more) below normal in parts of the East this week as a blast of Arctic air settles in like an unwanted houseguest who doesn't get the hint, Alex Fitzpatrick writes.

• More than 70 million Americans are under an extreme cold warning as of last night, stretching from Texas to Pennsylvania.

🧣 "[F]rigid temperatures will impact the eastern two-thirds of the U.S. this week, and numerous record lows are forecast," the National Weather Service says.

• The prolonged extreme cold means any snow and ice that fell during last weekend's winter storm may linger around.

Investors around the world are losing faith in traditional safe havens like the dollar and Treasuries, fueling a fierce rally in gold, which yesterday hit $5,000 an ounce for the first time, Axios Markets author Madison Mills writes.

• Why it matters: Gold prices have rallied over 17% so far this year as investors hedge their exposure to Washington. They're up more than 80% since President Trump took office a year ago.

🥇 Zoom in: Countries that used to hold their cash in dollars or Treasuries are looking to diversify away from the U.S.

• Central banks own more gold than U.S. Treasuries for the first time in 30 years as of October. The trend has continued into 2026.
• Increasing geopolitical risks — a trend partially driven by Trump — are also contributing to the spike in gold.

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CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss will announce several well-known new contributors, including longevity gurus Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia, during a hotly anticipated staff meeting today, sources tell Axios' Sara Fischer.

• Why it matters: The contributors are part of a broader effort by Weiss to change CBS News to align with a set of journalistic principles and guidelines she introduced in October.

🔭 Zoom in: The new contributors include mostly podcasters and independent writers, who will gain access to a large audience across CBS News' platforms.

• Some of those personalities are existing columnists and contributors for The Free Press, which Weiss founded. These include conservative historian Niall Ferguson and Patrick McGee, who covers the tech industry and China.
• The new lineup features New York chef Clare de Boer, bestselling cookbook author Caroline Chambers, and journalist Casey Lewis, who covers Gen-Z and Gen Alpha trends on Substack.

🎥 Between the lines: Weiss is importing an upstart newsroom model into a legacy media organization, prioritizing independent voices with built-in, loyal followings that could boost the cultural relevance of CBS News.

• The new lineup will test the newsroom's comfort with contributors who bring a sharper and more opinionated voice than the network has traditionally embraced.

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Today marks the start of Southwest Airlines' move to assigned seating — a change that reshapes how millions of Americans fly, Axios' Kelly Tyko writes.

• Under the new system, gate areas will shift away from numbered stanchions to digital boarding lanes, and boarding passes will show both seat assignments and boarding groups.

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This week's blizzard-themed New Yorker cover — "New York's Toughest" — celebrates "the brave souls who continue to work when the city is paralyzed by a snowstorm."

• The backstory.