Welcome to This Week in Trump, Slate’s weekly look at Donald Trump’s presidency. Every week, we’ll catch you up on the events of the past seven days, point you to further reading, and keep an eye on the @realDonaldTrump Twitter feed.

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Prime-Time Success

The president gave his first prime-time address on Tuesday night, and it’s official: He can read a teleprompter. Trump stuck to his talking points as he struck a broadly optimistic tone that was short on attacks on Democrats and the media but didn’t stint on nationalist rhetoric clearly influenced by chief strategist Stephen Bannon.

The agenda outlined in Trump’s speech was familiar. Again he characterized immigrants as threats to public safety and promised broad tax reform and a big infrastructure bill (both of which will have trouble making it through Congress). He also paid tribute to Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in a botched Yemen raid—a moment that was both deeply emotional and crassly manipulative.

Many pundits were quick to call Trump’s speech presidential. You shouldn’t believe them.

Sessions Under Pressure

The rosy glow from that speech lasted less than 24 hours, when the question of the Trump campaign’s connection to Russia was once again thrust into the headlines.

During his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Jeff Sessions told senators he hadn’t communicated with Russian officials during the presidential campaign. In fact, the Washington Post revealed on Wednesday, Sessions met twice with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Now congressional Republicans are calling on Sessions to recuse himself from any investigations of the Kremlin’s involvement in the elections. Democrats are going further and demanding his resignation.

Sessions says he didn’t talk about the election with the ambassador, and the administration characterized the revelation as a partisan attack.

Military Money

Trump announced this week he wants to boost defense spending by $54 billion, without cutting any entitlement programs, including Social Security and Medicare.

So where will the money come from? The State Department and foreign aid look to be prime targets, while the Environmental Protection Agency could see as much as a quarter of its budget slashed.

But maybe nothing needs to be cut at all! In an interview, Trump said the additional defense funding would come from “a revved-up economy.” (Most economists don’t share the president’s rosy view of future growth.)

The War With the Media Continues

The White House blocked a number of media outlets, including CNN, BBC, Politico, and the New York Times, among others, from attending an off-camera briefing with press secretary Sean Spicer. Right-wing outlets sympathetic to Trump, including Breitbart and One America News Network, were allowed to participate.

The blockade came shortly after Trump used a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference to slam the press and the penchant for unnamed sources. He then vowed to skip this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Also This Week

The president addressed the GOP’s continuing struggle to settle on a plan to replace Obamacare, saying, “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Trump told reporters he is open to granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants. CNN later reported that the comments were a “misdirection play.”

He also suggested that members of the Jewish community could be the perpetrators of anti-Semitic threats and attacks.

The president signed an order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider Obama’s Clean Water Rule and a bill nixing an Obama-era regulation that sought to keep certain mentally ill people from owning guns.

It took the administration almost a week to condemn the shooting of two Indian men in Kansas. “It begins to look like this was an act of racially motivated hatred,” a White House spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Press secretary Sean Spicer is carrying out random phone checks of White House staffers to crack down on leaks.

The White House tried to get senior FBI officials to contradict stories about contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Trump’s company sold a $15.8 million penthouse to a Chinese power broker who helps U.S. firms do business in China.

For his first dinner out in Washington, the commander in chief ate a well-done strip steak with ketchup at his own hotel.

Only 44 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, compared to 48 percent who disapprove, making him the first president to begin his tenure with a net-negative approval rating. The president grades himself on a gentler curve, saying he deserves an A for achievement and a “C or a C+” on messaging.

What to Read

The New Yorker dives deep into Russian influence on U.S. affairs with a 13,000-word piece by Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa. The authors see Moscow’s pro-Trump tendencies as part of a historic pattern and detect waning excitement for his presidency within the Kremlin:

The working theory among intelligence officials involved in the case is that the Russian approach—including hacking, propaganda, and contacts with Trump associates—was an improvisation rather than a long-standing plan. The official said, “After the election, there were a lot of Embassy communications”—to Moscow—“saying, stunned, ‘What we do now?’ ”

Initially, members of the Russian élite celebrated Clinton’s disappearance from the scene, and the new drift toward an America First populism that would leave Russia alone. The fall of Michael Flynn and the prospect of congressional hearings, though, have tempered the enthusiasm.

In the Guardian, Russian-born journalist Keith Gessen warns against giving Putin too much credit:

Compared to the 40-year cycle of US deindustrialisation, during which only the rich gained in wealth; the 25-year rightwing war on the Clintons; the eight-year-old Tea Party assault on facts, immigration and taxes; a tepid, centrist campaign; and a supposed late-breaking revelation from the director of the FBI about the dubious investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server—well, compared to all those factors, the leaked DNC emails must rank low on the list of reasons for Trump’s victory. And yet, according to a recent report, Hillary Clinton and her campaign still blame the Russians—and, by extension, Barack Obama, who did not make a big issue of the hacks before November—for her electoral debacle. In this instance, thinking about Putin helps not to think about everything else that went wrong, and what needs to be done to fix it.

In Slate, Jamelle Bouie writes that Trump’s failure to respond to the murder of two Indian nationals in Kansas was no coincidence:

It’s tempting to read the president’s silence on either Quebec City or Kansas as simple insensitivity. But that judgment is challenged by our ability to imagine the scenarios under which Trump would make a statement. If the situation in Kansas were reversed, if two Indian immigrants attacked a group of white patrons to intimidate the larger community, there’s little question that Trump would respond with anger and condemnation.

This Week in @realDonaldTrump

The president went on several tirades against leakers and “fake news” this week, specifically targeting the New York Times (twice) and CNN. He also suggested his supporters should “have their own rally,” predicting “it would be the biggest of them all!” (They did; it wasn’t.)

The commander in chief repeated a misleading talking point about the debt shortly after it was uttered on Fox News. He called Thomas Perez’s election as head of the DNC good news for Republicans, saying the race was “rigged” against “Bernie’s guy.”

Final Take

Trump had a starring role in Sunday’s Academy Awards, as host Jimmy Kimmel slammed the president during his opening monologue. “Remember last year when it seemed like the Oscars was racist?” he asked. He also referenced global opinion: “This broadcast is being watched live by millions of Americans and around the world in more than 225 countries that now hate us.”