Politico: “White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Trump. Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.”

“Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an Internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it. The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.”

Playbook: “President Trump’s quip that he might be taping conversations in the White House — and Sean Spicer’s follow up that he had nothing more to say about it — could have a real impact for his agenda in Washington. Democrats are already whispering about trying to slow legislation unless the president hands over tapes, or certifies he doesn’t have them. Democrats can force procedural votes on this topic, which could prove to be tough for Republicans. Who would vote against legislation to get to the bottom of whether the president is surreptitiously taping conversations? Democrats are looking for a quick and easy message. Many think this is it.”

“Lawmakers in both parties said Sunday that President Trump will need to hand over any recordings of conversations in the White House if such a taping system does exist,” the Washington Post reports.

“Trump suggested Friday that he taped private White House conversations with then-FBI Director James Comey, who was abruptly fired last week, and White House officials have not confirmed or denied the existence of a recording system.”

President Trump eschews exercise because he believes it drains the body’s “finite” energy resources, the Washington Post reports.

Trump’s views on exercise were mentioned in a New Yorker article this month and in Trump Revealed, which noted that Trump mostly gave up athletics after college because he “believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.”

Laurence Tribe: “Ample reasons existed to worry about this president, and to ponder the extraordinary remedy of impeachment, even before he fired FBI Director James Comey and shockingly admitted on national television that the action was provoked by the FBI’s intensifying investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia.”

“Even without getting to the bottom of what Trump dismissed as ‘this Russia thing,’ impeachable offenses could theoretically have been charged from the outset of this presidency. One important example is Trump’s brazen defiance of the foreign emoluments clause, which is designed to prevent foreign powers from pressuring U.S. officials to stray from undivided loyalty to the United States. Political reality made impeachment and removal on that and other grounds seem premature.”

“No longer. To wait for the results of the multiple investigations underway is to risk tying our nation’s fate to the whims of an authoritarian leader.”