Axios

"Peter is not running for governor." — Peter Thiel's spokesman, Jeremiah Hall

Backgrounder: Politico reported last month that tech investor and Donald Trump supporter Thiel was weighing a run for governor of California in 2018. Then, on Monday, a federal filing surfaced for a political action committee called "Draft Peter Thiel for Governor." For now, though, the going response to this sort of chatter is that he isn't pursuing a bid. The denial was first issued to Forbes.

On Monday, 31 additional tech companies joined an amicus brief filed on behalf of dozens of companies in opposition to Trump's immigration executive order. On Sunday, 97 companies signed off on the document, which was filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Notable new adds: Elon Musk's companies, Tesla and SpaceX, HP, and Zenefits—which until this week, was led by David Sacks, a friend and business associate of Peter Thiel. Musk is notoriously still on Trump's CEO council despite Uber CEO Travis Kalanick's resignation last week following backlash.

Still missing: IBM, Oracle, Palantir (co-founded by Thiel), and Yahoo, among others.

Sean Spicer had a quick gaggle with reporters on Monday as Trump flew home from Florida. He told them that Trump was "absolutely not" going to cancel the immigration executive order, and that they're not rethinking their strategy "at all."

"Once we win the case, it will go right back into action."

On other topics:

• When asked for examples of terrorist attacks that were "under reported," Spicer promised a list later. And when asked for evidence of jihadis "pouring in" to the country, he said, "I'm not going to get into specific information that the president has."
• Said the media is doing a lousy job covering the president; "a lot of those stories and success that he's had – in a mere two and a half weeks in office – aren't exactly covered to the degree to which they should be."
• Pushback on stories saying Trump isn't in charge at the White House: "When it comes to decisions and policy, it's the president who leads. The president tells us how to implement it."

At 7:07am President Trump tweeted: "I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it. Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!"

Under the surface:

• Trump's tweet sounded an awful lot like a segment this AM on Morning Joe, where Joe Scarborough said he'd never seen coverage of a White House staffer like the recent coverage of Steve Bannon (see: Time Magazine cover.) Joe said he thought the media had it "backwards" and that Trump was the final decider.
• Trump blames the media (for now.) He lashed out at the New York Times this morning, saying they are writing "total fiction" about him. Last night, the NYT's Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman depicted a White House in chaos with some key moves happening without Trump's knowledge.
• Bannon allies tell us they're nervous about all the coverage he's getting. They wish it would settle down a bit.

The reality: Bannon has a media problem. Sources who've known Trump for years say he hates it when staff overshadow him in credit or attention. Besides one provocative interview with the NYT, Bannon hasn't been courting this attention. He ignores most reporters and would not welcome the emerging comic theme — which included an SNL skit — that he is the true evil genius president and Trump his lackey. But if the blanket coverage of Bannon continues, that ultimately won't matter.

While speaking to coalition members and senior U.S. commanders at MacDill Air Force Base this afternoon, Trump said that his administration is behind NATO, an alliance he called "obsolete" days before his inauguration.

We strongly support NATO. We only ask that all of the NATO members make their full and proper financial contributions to the NATO alliance, which many of them have not been doing. Many of them have not been even close.— President Donald Trump

Trump's remarks follow his Sunday conversation with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, where the two discussed "how to encourage all NATO allies to meet their defense spending commitments," according to a White House statement. Trump agreed during the meeting that he will attend a NATO leaders' meeting in Brussels in May.

More than 1,200 tech employees from around the Bay Area have pledged to walk off their jobs at noon on Tuesday, March 14 (Pi day, for fellow nerds out there) to attend a rally at Palo Alto City Hall. Another 8,300 people have expressed interest in the so-called "Tech Stands Up" movement via a Facebook page.

Similar rallies are now being organized in Los Angeles and Austin, where the big tech conference SXSW will be in full force on March 14. Tech workers from Denver and New York have also reached out to the Tech Stands Up organizers to expand the effort. So far, employees from Facebook, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft and Google are among those participating.

Politico has a look inside the House Democrats' retreat in Baltimore this week.

Themed "Fighting for All Americans," the event will feature celebrity guests like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Chelsea Handler, but the events schedule for Democratic lawmakers shows the party's focus for the future:

• 2016 election post-mortem on the party's failure to gain House seats, led by Reps. Ben Ray Luján and Sean Patrick Maloney
• Closed-door session on fake news
• Panel titled "After the Women's March: Empowering Grassroots Energy"

President Trump, after his heated call with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, will get plenty of chances to redeem himself as a diplomat in coming months. AP's Darlene Superville points out that readouts from his calls with world leaders reveal a spate of upcoming overseas travel, heavy on Europe:

• Brussels: Trump agreed to attend a NATO leaders' meeting in late May, where he'll have to live down his "obsolete" gibe.
• Italy: Trump promised Italian PM Paolo Gentiloni that he'd attend a late-May summit of G-7 industrial nations in Taormina, Italy.
• Germany: Trump accepted the invitation of Angela Merkel to attend the G-20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany in early July.
• UK: Trump will attend a state visit extended by Queen Elizabeth II, expected this summer.

Several leaders are expected to come to him this month, including Japanese PM Shinzo Abe on Friday, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on Feb. 15, and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau sometime this month.

Some Trump campaign supporters became adept at using Twitter bots to amplify their online voices, giving him a little-recognized advantage on social media. A WashPost front-pager, "Online pundits use 'bots' to turn tweets into roars," by Craig Timberg in Chicago, unpacks the phenomenon:

• Two Twitter accounts of Daniel John Sobieski, 68, "one of the nation's most prolific conservative voices ... tweet more than 1,000 times a day using 'schedulers' that work through stacks of his own pre-written posts in repetitive loops."
• "Researchers have documented the power of automation technology to magnify some points of view while drowning out others... [I]t's like a giant megaphone..."
• "One research team found that 'highly automated accounts' supporting President Trump ... out-tweeted those supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton by a ratio of 5 to 1 in the final days before the vote."
• "This Twitter advantage had spillover effects, helping pro-Trump and anti-Clinton stories to trend online, making them more likely to find their way into Facebook feeds or Google's list of popular news stories."

The Senate Majority Leader prevented former President Obama from filling Justice Scalia's seat for nearly a year, saying he wanted to allow the next president, be they Republican or Democrat, to fill the seat. Now he's pushing Democrats to give him those rewards without having to blow up a Senate tradition.

McConnell has an op-ed at Politico today that urges Chuck Schumer to allow Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch to be confirmed without a filibuster.

I invite Leader Schumer and his party... to now follow through on their refrain of 'we need nine' by giving this tremendously well-qualified nominee fair consideration and an up-or-down vote.

The latest NYT look at the Trump White House includes details like the president giving White House tours, calling it a day at 6:30 pm to watch TV by himself in his bathrobe, and demanding more heads up on big executive orders.

Buried about 40 paragraphs deep is this passage on Chris Christie, who gave the president-elect a plan for staffing and running the White House, only to have the plan literally tossed in a trash can by a senior Trump aide. Now Christie is returning the favor. He told the Times:

The president deserves better than the rollout he got... [B]ecause of the botched implementation, they allowed his opponents to attack him by calling it a Muslim ban.