Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.

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• President Trump doubled down on one of the biggest gambles of his presidency with a televised appeal to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall. It was his first prime-time Oval Office address, a strategy that he himself privately disparaged as unlikely to work.

• The nine-minute speech made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions. The Times fact-checked the president’s remarks.

• The Times sent correspondents to the four states bordering Mexico and found few who shared the president’s sense of alarm. Many said there was indeed a humanitarian crisis unfolding — but they blamed the Trump administration for worsening it.

• President Trump has repeatedly warned that terrorists are pouring into the United States from Mexico. But his own government’s assessments conclude that Mr. Trump has seriously overstated the threat.

• This week would have been payday for 800,000 federal workers across the country. But as the shutdown drags on, no paychecks are arriving to replenish their savings or pay down their maxed-out credit cards.

• A formatting error by Paul Manafort’s defense lawyer revealed that Mr. Manafort, a top official in Mr. Trump’s campaign, discussed internal polling data during the 2016 race with a man tied to Russian intelligence.

• Former felons in Florida have begun registering to vote, after the approval in November of a historic ballot measure that restored the voting rights of as many as 1.5 million people.

• The Supreme Court refused to intercede in a mysterious fight over a sealed grand jury subpoena that may be part of the Mueller inquiry.

• President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey refused to meet John Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, saying that Mr. Bolton made a “grave mistake” when he said that Turkey must agree to protect Syria’s Kurds in the event of an American withdrawal.

• Emboldened House Democrats, seeking a politically charged debate on gun control, unveiled legislation to expand background checks to nearly all firearms purchases.

• The federal budget deficit continues to rise and is on pace to top $1 trillion for the 2019 fiscal year, as increased revenue from Mr. Trump’s tariffs fails to keep up with losses from his signature corporate tax cuts.

• Writing his first Supreme Court opinion for a unanimous court, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said that arbitrators rather than judges must decide whether disputes should be arbitrated.

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Today’s On Politics briefing was compiled by Isabella Grullón Paz in New York.

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