TRUMP AGENDA: Backlash
Breaking overnight: "Ten former senior U.S. diplomats and security officials planned to file an affidavit in a federal appeals court arguing that President Donald Trump's executive order curtailing immigration would actually make America less safe. In a brief scheduled to be filed at 3 a.m. ET on Monday the officials slammed Trump's order as "ill-conceived, poorly implemented and ill-explained." The brief obtained by NBC News was written jointly by two former heads of the CIA, two former Secretaries of State, a former Secretary of Defense, a former Secretary of Homeland Security, and senior officials of the National Security Council."
On Meet the Press on Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence defended Trump's comments about the federal judge who issued a ruling halting the immigration executive order.
NBC's Phil McCausland reports on the backlash to Trump's comparisons between the United States and Russia.
Mitch McConnell distanced himself from Trump's comments on Russia and the federal judiciary.
The New York Times takes a deep look at "a president determined to go big but increasingly frustrated by the efforts of his small team to contain the backlash."
POLITICO looks at how a bitterly divided Senate is barely functioning.
The Washington Post: "Fresh challenges to President Trump’s court-frozen immigration order took shape Monday with two former secretaries of state claiming the White House was undermining national security and nearly 100 Silicon Valley tech companies arguing it will keep the best minds from coming to America. The powerful new voices were added with another legal showdown coming as early as Monday. The suspension of the order, meanwhile, has allowed those previously banned more time to try to reach the United States."
"President Trump is barreling into a confrontation with the courts barely two weeks after taking office, foreshadowing years of legal battles as an administration determined to disrupt the existing order presses the boundaries of executive power," writes the New York Times.
The Washington Post looks at Twitter bots "called “cyborgs,” that mix human creativity and initiative with a computer’s relentless speed, allowing their views to gain audience while sidestepping the traditional gatekeepers of news and commentary."
Trump's day, per the AP: "President Donald Trump is making his first visit to the headquarters for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command."
DEM WATCH: Roiled and enraged
POLITICO: "The Democratic base is so roiled and enraged after only two weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency that a take-no-prisoners posture toward the White House is emerging as the price of entry for the 2020 primary. An election that could have focused in on economic inequality and the excesses of Wall Street — the issues that animate the left’s leading tribunes, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — is already shaping up as a contest about the intensity of the resistance to Trump."
Protests continued over the weekend in cities large and small.
The New York Times writes that protestors on the left are borrowing tactics from the Tea Party.