“President Trump threatened to use his executive power to force both chambers of Congress to adjourn if the Senate did not confirm his nominees for vacancies across the administration,” The Hill reports.

“The president, during a coronavirus briefing in the Rose Garden, offered a lengthy diatribe against what he described as congressional obstruction and argued confirming his nominees was more urgent than ever amid the pandemic.”

Washington Post: “Trump cited a never-exercised power the Constitution grants the president to adjourn Congress if leaders of the House and Senate can’t agree on whether to adjourn. The Senate often recesses but stays open in a ‘pro forma’ session, which thwarts Trump’s ability to make recess appointments that bypass the regular confirmation process.”

The Pentagon’s inspector general “could not definitively determine” whether the White House influenced the procurement process for a major cloud computing contract because senior officials were barred from answering questions because of the assertion of a “presidential communications privilege,” Politico reports.

McKay Coppins: “If you’ve tuned in to one of the daily coronavirus-task-force briefings, you’ve likely seen Trump himself make the case. ‘I knew it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,’ the president boasted last month. ‘I knew everything,’ he reiterated a couple of weeks later. Asked to assess his response to the virus, he responded emphatically, ‘I’d rate it at 10.'”

“Cable-news outlets have struggled with how to responsibly handle these briefings, which intersperse valuable updates from public-health officials with the president’s free-wheeling insult-comedy and medical misinformation. But the briefings command huge ratings…”

“This dynamic has effectively enabled the president to narrate America’s national trauma, while editing his own role in it. There are signs that his efforts are working: One Democratic strategist, who requested anonymity to describe private research, told me that when voters were shown 90 seconds of a recent Trump briefing, his performance in a general-election matchup against Joe Biden improved by more than two percentage points.”

President Trump told aides last month he wanted a daily radio show running two hours a day where he would take unscreened calls from ordinary Americans on the coronavirus pandemic, the New York Times reports.

He ultimately decided against it so as not to risk encroaching on Rush Limbaugh’s own radio show.