Terror and Nationalism: The Paris police officer killed Thursday by a terrorist on the Champs-Élysées was an openly gay man who had been one of the officers to respond to the mass attack on the Bataclan concert hall in 2015. Xavier Jugelé was 37.

President Trump predicted yesterday that the incident will have a major influence on Tuesday’s presidential election in France. He tweeted, “The people of France will not take much more of this. Will have a big effect on presidential election!”

With several right-wing candidates running for French president, the election will be a test of whether Trump’s brand of nationalism and nativism will take hold in Europe.

Permawar: More than 100 Afghan soldiers are dead after a Taliban attack on a military base in near the city of Mazar-e Sharif in northern Balkh province. Taliban fighters targeted soldiers those leaving Friday prayers at the base’s mosque and others in a canteen, the army said. The attackers, 10 of whom were killed, had worn military uniforms to get through checkpoints. The success of the attack clearly shows that base security was lax.

Promises, Promises: President Trump yesterday said he would release a “massive” tax cut program as early as next Wednesday, which seems to have come as a surprise to the rest of his administration. Trump told the Associated Press that his tax cuts would be “bigger, I believe, than any tax cut ever.” Naturally. And gold-plated, too.

Earlier in the day, when reporters asked Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, how close tax reform might be, he said, “Tax reform is way too complicated.”

Sanctuary: The Justice Department sent warning letters to nine major jurisdictions across the country, threatening them with loss of federal funds if they do not abandon their “sanctuary” policies regarding illegal immigrants charged with crimes. Some cities refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities, fearing that illegal immigrants will avoid cooperating with the local police.

The letter, straight out of the Trump administration playbook, says in part, “Many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime. The number of murders in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. New York City continues to see gang murder after gang murder, the predictable consequence of the city’s ‘soft on crime’ stance.”

An outraged NY Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “We did not become the safest big city in America by being ‘soft on crime.’”

Island in the Storm: Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been given a civics lesson after complaining in a radio interview about a judge in Hawaii blocking President Trump’s travel and immigration order. “I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the President of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and Constitutional power,” Sessions said.

Sessions has been reminded that the island in the Pacific to which he refers is one of 50 US States with a legal system identical to the other 49.

Nation: San Francisco was hit with a power outage yesterday that knocked out 90,000 customers in the city’s tech and financial district. — President Trump denied Exxon-Mobil special permission to work around economic sanctions to help Russia drill for oil and gas. The plans were initiated when the company was run by now Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. — Ann Coulter has rejected UC Berkeley’s renewed invitation to speak on a date different from the original. She says the new invitation includes too many restrictions, and anyway she has other plans. She says she will speak at the university on the original date, April 27^th, without a formal invitation.

Small Game, Small … : Big game hunter Donald Trump, Jr. plans to go on a prairie dog hunt while campaigning with  Montana Republican congressional candidate Greg Gianforte. Prairie dogs tend to vote Democratic.

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