President Trump has narrowed the search for his third White House chief of staff to five “mostly well known” people, Roll Call reports.

Trump said his five candidates are “really good ones” and “terrific people.”

“President Trump on Thursday tacitly admitted, for the first time, that he directed Michael Cohen to facilitate hush-money payments to two women who had alleged affairs with Trump, Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels,” the Washington Post reports.

“Whether Trump’s actions violated the law is an open question. His tweets were meant to argue that he didn’t specifically direct his former longtime personal attorney Cohen to do anything illegal, even if he did direct the payments.”

“But that valid legal question aside, it’s worth emphasizing just how horrendous of a coverup this whole episode has proved to be. Regardless of legal culpability, Trump and his team have spent the last 11 months engaging in a very public and irreconcilable effort to obscure all of this. And as the days pass, their statements look worse and worse.”

President Trump is expected to spend 16 days at Mar-a-Lago over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, according to an alert issued by the Federal Aviation Administration this morning, the Palm Beach Post reports.

“If you just want to keep track of how much the president has lied about that, he said he didn’t know about the payment. I know it’s hard to keep track of all this stuff, the disclosures come bit by bit, but I mean come on, he lied so extravagantly about this story from beginning to end.”

— Jeffrey Toobin, quoted by The Hill, about President Trump consistently denying he knew anything about hush payments made to a porn star and Playboy model.

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.