Start your morning by reading Playbook, our flagship newsletter on politics and power in the nation’s capital. Sign up for it HERE.

If you prefer to start your day hands-free, we’ve got you covered: Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman give an audio rundown of the day’s biggest stories, in 90 seconds. Listen HERE or subscribe via iTunes and Soundcloud.

Missed the morning rush? Check back here (politico.com/playbook-plus) at 1 p.m. ET for the Power Lunch, a bite-sized roundup of stories that broke in the hours after Playbook went out.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

You can get “Playbook in 90 Seconds” on your Amazon Echo device with these easy steps:

1) Open the Alexa app on your smartphone or tablet.
2) Select the “skills” tab.
3) Search for “POLITICO Playbook” and click the icon.
4) Hit the “enable” button on the skills page

Listen on Soundcloud here.

Listen on iTunes here.

Carl Cameron has covered politics for more than 30 years and, as chief political correspondent for Fox News, he's used to liberals criticizing his employer. But he’s never seen a candidate as tough on the media as Donald Trump – even of the ostensibly friendly Fox News. Trump regularly criticizes him at his rallies, Cameron told us, because he often fact-checks the Republican nominee in his reports, particularly his inflated crowd sizes. “Donald Trump’s probably called me out from the podium more than any other reporter,” he said by phone from the trail in Wisconsin. Excerpts:

“Never before” has he seen a candidate been so anti-media: “In my career covering national politics, the cliché was when the candidate criticizes the media, it’s never a good thing [for them] ... And you don’t hear that very often anymore. Trump’s senior aides, some still with him, some long gone, make no bones about the fact that part of what they were trying to do was discredit the media, knowing that there were going to be some very difficult, tough stories coming from the media about his business record among other things. ... ‘Never trust a politician, never trust the media’ -- that’s a good bumper sticker or even the name of a band.”

From breakfast bourbon to bottled water on the trail: “This race has largely been about transcribing what the candidate says and almost no time for analysis since he says so much that’s news-worthy. ... [The campaign trail] is dramatically different [from before]. In the old days, in the true ‘Boys on the Bus’ book that was such a classic for political junkies, those guys, the old greats, they were playing poker, smoking cigars and drinking bourbon for breakfast. And they did those breakfasts with the candidates, frequently. That doesn’t exist anymore. Nowadays me and my colleagues get up and we drink bottled water, have a granola bar and get on the treadmill. No one smokes cigarettes anymore.”

Trump’s nighttime rallies are golden: “His evening rallies are the best measure of his discipline and the policies and the attack lines that he’s going to be using. What he does at the end of the day is the culmination of everything, when it gets loosest and most entertaining and most news-making. ... [T]he most important thing to realize is that those of us who are out here full time and covering it have a continuity with the candidates that it’s hard to convey in print and paper. Back during the primaries, we had easy, easy access to them and could ask all kinds of questions and relationships are built a year and a half, two years before.”

Why it’s important for D.C. journalists to get out of the Beltway: “When I do get home, I rarely get home for more than a day and a half and the vast amount of hours spent doing my laundry and repacking. ... And I’m totally OK with that. I think it’s so important to get out of Washington to cover politics. There is a groupthink in Washington, there’s no question about it. Everybody has to match the next guy’s story and in the process of doing that, let the one that they were actually enterprising on rot on the vine.”

Met Trump in mid-1990s in New Hampshire: “I’m originally from New Hampshire and Trump came up to New Hampshire in the 1990s feeling around whether he was going to run for president. He ran on the reform party ticket in 2000 and he got delegates at the convention in California. ... He and I go back a long way.”

Trump’s crowds go after Cameron sometimes: “I’ve been hassled too. Donald Trump’s probably called me out from the podium than any other reporter mostly because he likes to exaggerate crowd size and when I report either what came up through the metal detector or the fact that there’s a few thousand people, he comes out and says that there’s 15,000 and says ‘the media’s incredibly dishonest and Campaign Carl, count em up.’ ... They turn around, some laugh and some give us the finger.”

Challenges this year of campaign trail coverage: “Of all the campaigns that I’ve covered end to end and this goes back to 1996 ... this is by far the most grueling and difficult and part of that speaks to Trump’s organization. They are very, very late in their delivery of their calendar and itinerary and planning. So it means that my producer spends inordinate amount of time dealing with logistics, and the two of us together are very much a 50-50 partnership and we do a ton of driving, a ton of flying on a typical day.”

Trump’s missed opportunity: “In Donald Trump’s rhetoric, you hear a lot of positive references to the LGBT community, what he would do for minorities, etc., but that was not the campaign that was run in the primaries that ultimately defined him.”

Image from Getty.