Matt Bai: “What that televised confrontation really showed is that Trump understands exactly what keeps his listing presidency afloat, even if you don’t.”

“First of all, Trump knows that immigration — legal, illegal, extraterrestrial, whatever — is the single resonant issue of his political life, and has been since he rode down that escalator and straight into our nightmares. He may run afoul of Republicans and independents when it comes to Russia or Saudi Arabia or trade, but he can always come home again to the issue that got him here in the first place.”

“Trump could have had the Secret Service handcuff Pelosi and Schumer right there and force-fed them his remaining inventory of Trump steaks, and as long as he said he was doing it to keep undocumented, nonwhite people out of the country, his core voters would applaud.”

“And Trump the entertainer understands, in a way his critics still don’t, that most Americans are bone-tired of all the phony stagecraft. What we in Washington consider dignified behavior worthy of the office strikes an awful lot of voters as something else — namely, a condescending put-on.”

Philip Bump: “Let us dispatch quickly with a lot of truly remarkable context for President Trump’s Thursday morning tweets denying culpability for alleged campaign-finance law violations. So we’ll note only hastily how noteworthy it is that a sitting president has been implicated by his own Justice Department in the commission of multiple felonies. Quickly note how significant it is that those felonies relate to allegations from a Playboy model and an adult-film actress that the president engaged in extramarital affairs. Mention in passing that a person who served as the president’s personal attorney for nearly a decade, Michael Cohen, has been sentenced to three years in prison in part for violating campaign finance laws to keep those relationships from being discussed publicly before the election.”

“And, of course, dedicate only one line to the president’s striking demand that Americans ignore his demonstrably false claims about the payments — that he wasn’t aware of them, that he wasn’t involved — and instead accept this latest, complicated iteration as God’s-honest-truth.”

First Read: “If you turn on your TV news, scroll through your newspapers and thumb through your tweets, this might seem like just another normal week in the Trump Era. The president’s former lawyer/fixer was sentenced to three years in jail; Trump got rid of his chief of staff but has no replacement lined up; and the government appears hurtling toward a possible partial government shutdown. Boring. Ho-hum. Same old, same old.”

“But let’s snap out of it. It’s a HUGE deal that another person close to the president or his 2016 campaign was sentenced/indicted/pleaded guilty for wrongdoings. It’s a HUGE deal that there’s so much internal chaos in the White House that it’s too much for a four-star general, and that the odds-on favorite to replace him as chief of staff didn’t want the job. It’s a HUGE deal that the president has threatened to shut down the government if he doesn’t get his border wall.”

“And it’s a HUGE deal that the president of the United States has been identified as Individual-1 in prosecutors’ legal filings.”

“We get the temptation of how these stories can become numbing – to the public, to the journalists covering them, and to Washington at large. But remember, any of these stories this week would be a five-alarm political fire for any other presidency.”

“Am I concerned that the president might be involved in a crime. Of course.”

— Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), quoted by NBC News.

“Despite President Trump’s public declaration that he isn’t concerned about impeachment, he has told people close to him in recent days that he is alarmed by the prospect,” NBC News reports.

“Trump’s fear about the possibility has escalated as the consequences of federal investigations involving his associates and Democratic control of the House sink in, the sources said, and his allies believe maintaining the support of establishment Republicans he bucked to win election is now critical to saving his presidency.”

Asha Rangappa: “If, at the end of his inquiry, Mueller believes that he has gathered enough evidence that would warrant charging Trump with one or more crimes, he can provide that evidence in his final report to the attorney general, along with a recommendation that the president be indicted. The attorney general could approve that recommendation, in which case such an indictment would become public (with its constitutionality litigated in court). But the attorney general could just as legitimately deny the requests based on the internal 1973 policy that suggests an indictment is ‘inappropriate and unwarranted under established Departmental practices.'”

“But this action would automatically trigger the reporting requirement to Congress.”

“In fact, that might be the only way to guarantee a report goes to Capitol Hill. There is no other requirement for the attorney general to provide Mueller’s final report to Congress — the regulations only require reports on requests that are denied. If Mueller does not recommend indicting the president and the attorney general agrees with that decision, there is no guaranteed mechanism for that information to become public.”