CNN's Jay McMichael and crew set up shop on the outskirts of Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach and caught the president on his 17th trip to the golf course of his 84-day presidency. Although news of Trump's golf outings are well known, there aren't many photos of him actually hitting the links as president. Check it out above.
The Trump Administration won't be revealing who visits the White House complex, Time reports. And the records of who visited the WH during Trump's presidency won't become available until five years after he leaves office.
On what grounds? The administration will file these as presidential records, using a 2013 federal court ruling that said WH visitor logs can remain private since they aren't subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Why? Per WH Communications Director Michael Dubke, the decision reflects a consideration of "the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually."
Context: The Obama Administration disclosed more than 6 million records of visitors during his presidency, although it did try to maintain its right to redact or withhold records, and often left logs incomplete for personal or donor meetings. The Trump Administration's move falls in line with other administrations' take on this issue, per the NYT.
The Winter White House rules: Secret Service doesn't disclose who visits the Mar-a-Lago resort.
The U.S. dropped the "Mother of all Bombs" (MOAB) on ISIS militants in Afghanistan on Thursday, but the White House has so far deferred all questions about the decision to do so.
What they're saying: "This was the right weapon for the right time," Gen. John W. Nicholson told reporters about the MOAB. He explained that ISIS militants in Afghanistan are using caves and tunnels, and our military's ground forces would not have been enough.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren makes it clear in her new book, "This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class" (out Tuesday) that she wants to remain central to the Democrats' conversation as they look toward 2020.
We got our mitts on a signed copy. At times, Warren takes the breezily dismissive approach to Trump that may be the key to rankling him in his reelection race, referring at one point to "the hot-air balloon known as @RealDonaldTrump."
When President Trump 2.0 emerged this week with a slew of more conventional Republican positions, a big question was: How long will it last? Trump insiders promise this is more than a mood: It's the result of Trump's instinctive desire to win, after a series of dropped balls. A West Wing confidant told Axios:
We're seeing the working out of his improvisational personality, based on new and immediate inputs.
The Trump administration is telling federal agencies to get smaller and more streamlined. But the size of the federal workforce has remained relatively stable since the late 90s and is a relatively small slice of total government employment. Here's how federal government employment compares to the local and state-level, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
When asked by the White House press pool today if he had personally ordered the use of the "Mother of All Bombs" on an ISIS compound in Afghanistan today, President Trump responded:
Everybody knows exactly what happened. What I do is I authorize my military... we have given them total authorization.
Today was a day of few answers from Sean Spicer. He would not say whether Trump personally ordered the use of the largest non-nuclear bomb ever dropped today in Afghanistan, or explain why the president had flip-flopped on labeling China a currency manipulator and supporting the Export/Import Bank. More highlights:
Details of MOAB bomb: "We targeted a system of tunnels and caves that ISIS fighters use to move around freely," said Spicer, adding, "in order to defeat the group we must deny them operational space, which we did."
Reversals/shifts in Trump policies: Spicer argued that it's not so much that Trump has shifted on issues so much as that the issues have shifted toward him, citing NATO as an example.
Syria/North Korea: When asked whether the U.S. might drop a MOAB bomb on Syria or North Korea, Spicer said that all questions should be directed to the Defense Department.
Italy visit: Trump will welcome Italy PM Paolo Gentiloni to the White House on April 20 to discuss the upcoming G7 summit, and a range of other issues.
President Bashar al-Assad told AFP that last week's chemical weapons attack is "100 percent fabrication," and that the U.S. concocted the whole story in "order to have a pretext" for the missile strike on his forces.
"There was no order to make any attack. We don't have any chemical weapons. We gave up our arsenal three years ago. Even if we had them, we wouldn't use them. We have never used our chemical arsenal in our history, said Assad. "Our impression that the West, mainly the United States, is hand-in-glove with the terrorists. They fabricated the whole story in order to have a pretext for the attack."
An important detail: The AFP said that during the TV interview, the Syrian government wouldn't let them use their own cameras — only cameras belonging to the Syrian government were allowed. And afterward, the government only gave AFP the tape of the first 5 questions and answers.
Meanwhile: Samples taken from the attack in Syria tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, the British delegation at the world's chemical weapons watchdog said on Thursday, per Reuters.
Florida inspectors dug around Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in the days leading up to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's state visit, and found 13 health violations in the club's kitchen, which is a record for a place that charges $200k in membership fees, according to the Miami Herald.
The violations: Three violations were deemed "high priority," meaning they were prone to carrying bacteria that could make customers violently ill. The other 10 violations weren't as serious, including one that described water at the sink where employees wash their hands as too cold to successfully sanitize them.
Sound smart: conservatives should have seen this coming. Trump goes where the applause is loudest. If that means being a full-throated birther, fine! If that means inciting hysterics about Mexicans, game on! If that means hugging NATO or smiling at corporate cronyism, Trump's your man! It would be a hoot if he came full circle and morphed into Michael Bloomberg.
Trump campaigned as an ardent and unapologetic nationalist. He railed against international and regional institutions and said America needed to stop spending money overseas and start taking care of business at home. He told us Assad was not the problem and Putin was a guy with whom he could do business.
But in less than a week Trump has morphed into a guy who could almost be mistaken for a conventional Republican president. Trump appeared in the White House's East room yesterday and gave remarks that could've come from the mouth of George H.W. Bush.
Our thought bubble: We've been charting the ascendance of the Jared Kushner camp in the administration and there's no mistaking it. Jared, Ivanka, Gary Cohn, Dina Powell — they and their worldview are ascendant.
