The new White House press secretary just took the podium, delivered a statement claiming that President Trump's inaugural was the largest ever, hammered the press for reporting that his crowd was considerably smaller than Obama's, and declined to answer questions.
Key quote: "We're going to hold the press accountable."
As former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer put it: "This is called a statement you're told to make by the President. And you know the President is watching."
Trump, in a speech at the CIA headquarters today, did not hold back against the media.
He also called out TIME's Zeke Miller for incorrectly stating in a pool report that a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was removed from the Oval Office:
A hardline immigration leader (somebody whose work has strongly influenced top Trump adviser Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller) told Axios recently to read some of May's previous speeches on immigration. He was majorly impressed.
The British PM enjoys significant goodwill among Trump's nationalist allies, particularly due to her tougher positions on immigration. She's no Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader and spearhead of the Brexit movement, but she's regarded warily as a potential friend of Trump's nationalist populist movement.
Donald Trump will take his first foreign leader meeting as President with British Prime Minister Theresa May. They'll meet Thursday, says White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
Behind the Scenes:
A senior source tells Axios that Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon played an important role in pushing the meeting to happen earlier than originally planned.
Bannon has also been in contact with Boris Johnson, the British Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and one of the chief cheerleaders of the Brexit movement.
Jared Kushner was also very influential in the process, we are told.
In his brief remarks on Saturday, Trump said any sense of him feuding with the intelligence community was invented by the media.
I have a running war with the media. They are the most dishonest people on earth. — Trump to CIA employees
Why it matters: The CIA endorsed the conclusions of an intelligence report saying that Russia interfered with the election to boost Trump. Trump dismissed those reports, and even suggested outgoing CIA Director John Brennan leaked the reports.
In the initial days after Donald Trump won the election, his advisers began discussing how to make his inauguration different from the shows of the past.
While Trump's Inauguration Committee had trouble drawing celebrities to perform at events throughout the weekend, Women's March organizers have rallied a series of A-listers to participate in today's event. They'll be appearing in crowds that dwarf the inauguration festivities.
Here are the famous people you can expect to see marching through Washington.
One of the more contentious — and consequential — international relationships is set to be that between Donald Trump and the German leader Angela Merkel.
One of the underpinnings of the Trump team's plans is the notion that the quislings in the establishment fail to see the world as it actually is. This is nasty, brutish and short, applied to governing. There's plenty of delusion among the establishment, but Trump's speech overcorrects. An AP Fact Check ticks off three ways he overshot:
"The American economy is a lot healthier than the wreck Trump describes. Jobs have increased for a record 75 straight months. The U.S. unemployment rate was 4.7 percent in December, close to a nine-year low and to what economists consider full employment."
"The U.S. military … remains the world's most advanced, expensive and far-flung fighting force. American military spending is nearly three times that of second-place China."
"Quelling radical Islamic terrorism worldwide is a heavy lift in which the U.S. has been engaged for years, and Trump has offered no plan for how he will deliver on" the promise in his speech to "unite the civilized world against radical Islamic terrorism, which we will eradicate completely from the face of the Earth."
The new president's 16-minute address tipped his hand — in ways both subtle, and stunningly blunt — about his political plan for the coming years. Yes, he plans to pound his America-first, Washington-sucks message that the establishment and media hate. But it was telling how much time he spent talking about infrastructure and jobs for ALL Americans, twice sounding racially inclusive notes.
Stephen Miller, the speech's principal writer, and Steve Bannon, whose worldview dominated and who helped with the prose , see a huge infrastructure bill as a way to attract voters, especially minorities, who opposed Trump in 2016. They argue privately they will shake up voting coalitions if they run new roads, repair tunnels and provide web access to other classes or regions of forgotten Americans. They also believe tariffs and bullying of corporate-outsourcers will change some minds, too.
The coastal bubbles hated the speech. But, like the campaign, it wasn't aimed at them.
Russia signed signed an agreement Friday giving it a much greater ability to deploy military forces in Syria for at least the next HALF-CENTURY, per the NYT.The winner: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of his people during the six-year war to hold power.Elsewhere:
More from the NYT: "As the clock wound down on Barack Obama's presidency, an Air Force B-52 bomber carried out a punishing airstrike against a training camp of al Qaeda in Syria, the Pentagon said Friday. The attack, which took place west of Aleppo, killed more than 100 fighters."
British Prime Minister Theresa May, the first leader Trump mentioned in our interview when asked about his top allies, told the Financial Times she would be very frank about the need for a strong NATO and EU. Trump has very critical of both institutions.
