“During a tense White House briefing on Thursday, CNN’s Jim Acosta challenged the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to disavow President Trump’s description of journalists as ‘the enemy of the people,'” the New York Times reports.

“Ms. Sanders declined to do so, saying she had been personally attacked in the media and had faced threats since starting her job.”

First Read: “But here’s a reminder after Huckabee Sanders attacked the press: She’s a public official who works for the American people. It’s one thing for a campaign or party operative to say the things that Huckabee Sanders did yesterday – it’s another for someone whose salary is paid for by American taxpayers to say it.”

Susan Glasser: “History books will likely declare the last few months a turning point in the Trump Presidency, and Kessler’s laborious work gives us metrics that confirm what is becoming more and more apparent: the recent wave of misstatements is both a reflection of Trump’s increasingly unbound Presidency and a signal attribute of it. The upsurge provides empirical evidence that Trump, in recent months, has felt more confident running his White House as he pleases, keeping his own counsel, and saying and doing what he wants when he wants to.”

“The fact that Trump, while historically unpopular with the American public as a whole, has retained the loyalty of more than eighty per cent of Republicans—the group at which his lies seem to be aimed—means we are in for much more, as a midterm election approaches that may determine whether Trump is impeached by a newly Democratic Congress. At this point, the falsehoods are as much a part of his political identity as his floppy orange hair and the ‘Make America Great Again’ slogan.”

A new Garin-Hart-Yang/Global Strategy Group poll finds “the worst ratings for Trump on his truthfulness, temperament, dealings with Russia, and immigration policies we have not seen in any of our eleven previous national tracking surveys on the Trump presidency.”

Key finding “Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin, his handling of immigration and the separation of children from their families, and the impact of his trade war have stuck with voters in a way nothing else has since the beginning of his presidency.”

“President Trump and his legal team are likely to decide whether to grant special counsel Robert Mueller an interview with Trump within a ‘week to 10 days,’ Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani said,” according to Politico.

“The former New York City mayor said Trump’s legal team will spend the weekend contemplating a new set of parameters proposed by Mueller for an interview with the president, then make a decision shortly thereafter.”

Playbook: “This is just the latest time Giuliani has invoked a short timeline for making a decision about whether the president will sit down with Mueller. Remember Trump was supposed to sit down with Mueller in January. That decision got pushed to May. Then June. And then July. We’re now in August.”

A major donor to Donald Trump agreed to pay Trump’s former personal attorney, Michael Cohen, $10 million dollars if he could successfully secure “funding for a nuclear-power project,” the Wall Street Journal reports.