Axios

President Trump has apparently backed down from his plan to urge states to raise the age to purchase assault weapons to 21. Senior White House officials laying out his school safety agenda in a conference call on Sunday said the idea would be examined by a new Federal Commission on School Safety to be chaired by Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

The backdrop: This comes after The National Rifle Association filed a federal lawsuit on Friday, seeking to overturn a new Florida law signed by Gov. Rick Scott that raises the age limit to 21 and includes a three-day waiting period on gun purchases. The group, which spent millions in support of Trump's presidential bid, said it violates Americans’ constitutional rights.

His staff have whiplash, but Donald Trump is having the time of his life. He had one of his most joyous weeks of his presidency last week.

While senior officials and cabinet secretaries were struggling to keep up — and many eventually threw up their hands when they realized they couldn't keep track of what was going on with tariffs and North Korea — Trump was careening around the building, acting as his own chief of staff, chief strategist, cable news producer, and communications director all rolled into one.

There's a reason Trump said hardly anything about Republican candidate Rick Saccone during a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday night that was supposed to promote his candidacy.

• The reason: Trump thinks Saccone is a terrible, "weak" candidate, according to four sources who've spoken to the president about him.
• Trump held that opinion of Saccone before leaving for the rally, and I've not been able to establish whether his time on the ground with the candidate changed his mind.

President Trump tweeted that media reports that his approval ratings are lower than those of President Obama are "fake news." Here are the facts:

• RealClearPolitics' polling average places Trump's approval at 40.9%, significantly lower than Obama's approval (48.5%) at the same time during his presidency.
• Rasmussen Reports' latest numbers, from Friday, put Trump's approval rating at 44% — not "around 50%." Rasmussen, whose "likely voter" model tends to favor Republicans, also had Obama at 44% on the same day in 2010.
• The bottom line: Trump's numbers have ticked upward, and his current approval rating is higher than the low point of Obama's presidency (39.8% per RCP). But Trump's rating remains below the 48% that Obama averaged over 8 years, and far below the 57.2% rating he had when he left office.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" that President Trump's verbal attacks against Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Maxine Waters, as well as journalists like Todd, should be set aside as "campaign rally issues."

• Mnuchin: I think you should be focused on the policies. He is using these vulgarities in the context of a campaign rally. Obviously, there were a lot of funny moments at that rally."
• Todd, who Trump called "a sleeping son of a bitch" at Saturday's rally: "Yeah ... they were hilarious."

The coverage called him unleashed, unplugged and unscripted.

During last night's 73-minute rally in Moon Township, Pa. — campaigning for Republican Rick Saccone ahead of Tuesday's Pittsburgh-area special election for the U.S. House — President Trump tipped his hand on his three years of campaign speeches to come:

President Trump had an Oval Office meeting this past week with Emmet Flood, a Washington lawyer who represented Bill Clinton during his impeachment process, the New York Times reports. No final decision has been made, but the president is reportedly considering bringing Flood onto his legal team to help deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

The details: "Should Mr. Flood come on board, [two sources] said, his main duties would be a day-to-day role helping the president navigate his dealings with the Justice Department," per the Times.

President Trump is slowly but surely giving Democrats a shot at winning the House and Senate in 2018. If this happened, the House would surely move to impeach him.

The big picture: The numbers — not just in Alabama, but for the totality of elections in 2017 — have top Republicans rattled. Democrats, flat as could be after 2016, suddenly see the makings of a 2018 comeback, but they still face a tough path.

Most voters in nine out of the ten states that voted for Trump and have Democratic senators up for reelection this year support DACA protections for immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children, and majorities in every state think that undocumented immigrants working in the U.S. should be given a pathway to citizenship, according to new Axios/SurveyMonkey polls.

Why it matters: Democrats need to pick up two seats to regain control of the Senate and, as we wrote earlier this week, could lose ground in these races. But polling has shown that most Americans blame Republicans more than Democrats for not finding a solution to protect "Dreamers," and think Trump wants to deport them. The support for DACA and pathways to citizenship could help Senate Democrats keep their seats.