“The Trump administration on Friday stepped up its effort to place a citizenship question on the 2020 Census, after the president said he was mulling an executive order to deal with the impasse and Justice Department lawyers told a federal judge they were still looking for a legal way forward,” the Washington Post reports.

“The Supreme Court has called the administration’s rationale for the question ‘contrived’ and said the government could not go forward without a solid justification. On Friday, Trump and a key official mentioned other possible reasons for adding the query in statements that added to a week-long swirl of contradictions and that could make the administration’s case even more difficult.”

Playbook: “If the administration goes in this direction, it will likely end up in courts again, and those courts have already blocked this.”

Washington Post: “The RFP is used to solicit bids for the print job itself and includes the actual numbers of documents that will need to be prepared for distribution.”

“In total, it’s 1.53 billion distinct pieces of material. And that’s the finished product. Including the various pages of the questionnaires that need to be produced, we’re talking about more than 2 billion sheets of paper which need to be printed between now and the start of the Census.”

President Trump — who used to mock predecessor Barack Obama for using the devices during speeches — said on Friday that technical problems with the teleprompter during his “Salute to America” led to his head-scratching remarks about the Continental Army securing not-yet existent “airports” during the Revolutionary War, NBC News reports.

McSweeney’s: The battle for John F. Kennedy International Airport, 1776.

“I don’t think I’m a bully.”

— President Trump, quoted by CBS News, responding to criticism by Joe Biden.