CNN: “The two men spend more time together now than at any point in their tenures, advisers said. As the outbreak wears on, Trump has grown to better understand Pence’s usefulness in ways some aides said he questioned before the crisis.”

“At some points in his presidency, Trump occasionally wondered aloud why he needed a vice president at all… Now, the President has taken to praising Pence’s efforts — even if he often seems to make them more difficult.”

Don Lemon addressed President Trump directly on CNN:

“What is it about President Obama that really gets under your skin? Is it because he’s smarter than you? Better educated? Made it on his own—didn’t need Daddy’s help? Wife is more accomplished? Better looking? I don’t know, what is it, what is it about him? That he’s a black man that’s accomplished being president? That he punked you on the whole birth certificate thing? What is it about him? Just wondering.”

As the death toll from coronavirus nears 70,000 in the United States, President Trump gave himself high marks this morning in dealing with the crisis:

“Getting great reviews, finally, for how well we are handling the pandemic, especially our strong production of desperately needed ventilators, the building of field hospitals & beds, and soon, the great things we are doing on testing. People are really working well together!”

President Trump delivered another rapid series of false and misleading claims on Sunday night, this time at a Fox News “virtual town hall” event at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, CNN reports.

Trump was dishonest both about matters pertaining to the coronavirus pandemic and about his usual array of other topics, from trade with China to his rally crowds.

“Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday said that he should have worn a mask when visiting the Mayo Clinic, a reversal that came after a harsh backlash for not adhering to the hospital’s policy during the coronavirus pandemic,” Politico reports.

Said Pence: “I didn’t think it was necessary, but I should have worn a mask at the Mayo Clinic and I wore it when I visited the ventilator plant in Indiana.”

President Trump told Fox News that he is treated “worse” than President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in 1865.

Said Trump: “I am greeted by a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen… They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”

Dan Balz: “As Washington has stumbled, governors of both parties have acted to fill the void. States have pleaded with Washington for help, and sometimes have gotten it. As often, however, the tensions and disagreements between state leaders and the federal government — especially with President Trump — have come to define the crisis.”

“As Trump dallied, governors moved on their own to order their residents to stay at home. When the president threatened to force states to lift those restrictions, governors resisted. When Trump supported protesters demanding that their states be opened up, many governors — though not all — said they would follow federal guidelines to the letter or even go beyond.”

 “This display of state power is very much as the Founders intended when they established the nation.”

“President Trump is not happy with FBI director Christopher Wray and would love to replace him,” Axios reports.

“Figures close to Trump tell him that Wray cannot be trusted to root out what they view as ‘corruption’ at the highest levels of the FBI.”

“But Trump has been deferring to Attorney General Bill Barr and is unlikely to remove Wray before the election.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) declined an invitation from President Trump to participate in a White House press briefing last month, the Washington Post reports.

New York Times: “In the most consequential mission of his career, Mr. Pence has tried to navigate the complexities of a mysterious disease and the vagaries of a mercurial president at the same time, steering the response to the most deadly pandemic in generations without getting caught up in the melodrama of the moment. Yet questions have lingered about how seriously he himself took the threat at first and what advice he gave the president in the days when it really mattered”

Another governor, who asked not to be named, said Mr. Pence never betrays what he really thinks about the president’s behavior: “Multiple times, I say, ‘But Mike, this is just crazy,’ and sometimes there will be a little pause and I’m waiting for him to say, ‘Yes, I know.’’ But he never does. Instead, Mr. Pence says, ‘I understand. Thank you for your input.’”

Evan Osnos reports from Greenwich, Connecticut, where he grew up, on how America’s country-club Republicans learned to love Donald Trump — and the quiet compromises that a person makes in the privacy of a voting booth.

“The story of Trump’s rise is often told as a hostile takeover. In truth, it is something closer to a joint venture, in which members of America’s élite accepted the terms of Trumpism as the price of power.”

Politico: “Over nearly two days, Trump is expected to meet with his chief of staff Mark Meadows and other top advisers like Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow and press secretary Kayleigh McEnany to plan for his televised coronavirus town hall at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday night and weigh various tax policy and regulatory proposals to boost the economy.”

“It’s all part of the White House’s broader strategy of shifting its coronavirus message to an economic one — a move the president’s political advisers believe plays more to his strengths as a former real estate developer.”

Washington Post: “The daily images projected a sense of confidence that life, at least for the nation’s most prominent resident, is returning to a semblance of normalcy amid the coronavirus pandemic — a visual cue to the public that conditions are improving as Trump pushes to restart sectors of the economy.”

“Yet even as Trump aides have signaled that he could soon begin regular travel, the reality is that the White House has created a picture of security that is propped up by special access to the kind of wide-scale covid-19 testing that most of the nation remains without.”

Although White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany pledged to reporters to “never lie to you,” the Washington Post reports that just 15 minutes later “she raised a subject no one had asked about and quickly offered an obviously false claim about it.”

“If her goal was to establish her credibility as press secretary, she very quickly got off to a bad start.”

Lawfare: “The president may well pardon Flynn, as he has long hinted. It’s possible—though for reasons we’ll explain, we think unlikely—that Judge Emmet Sullivan will allow Flynn to withdraw his plea. And it’s possible as well that Attorney General Bill Barr, who has already intervened in the case once before and has asked a U.S. attorney to review its handling, will intervene once again on Flynn’s behalf.”

“So far, however, nothing has emerged that remotely clears Flynn; nothing has emerged that would require Judge Sullivan to allow him to withdraw his plea; and nothing has emerged that would justify the Justice Department’s backing off of the case—or prosecuting it aggressively if Flynn were somehow allowed out of the very generous deal Special Counsel Robert Mueller cut him.”