▪ “The country is entering a new and precarious phase, in which the central question about President Donald Trump is not whether he is coming unstrung, but rather just how unstrung he is going to get.” — Peter Nicholas, “The Unraveling of Donald Trump: As the impeachment inquiry intensifies, some associates of the president predict that his already erratic behavior is going to get worse.”

▪ We’re in an astonishing situation. Mr. Trump seems to have single-handedly and unilaterally precipitated a national security crisis in the middle east.

You know, at the end of the day, he green-lighted the Turkish invasion. The five-day pause is probably a good thing. Maybe it will reduce the number of people murdered by Arab militias that are following the Turkish army. Give the Kurds time to run for their lives. Where they’re supposed to go is beyond me. 

But, you know, the instant take on this is: You allow Assad to reenter the Kurdish areas. You allow Iranian dominance in the region. And you let the Russian military occupy abandoned, hastily abandoned U.S. military outposts. It’s an astonishing outcome. What did Mr. Trump think he was getting out of all this? — General Barry McCaffrey, retired — “Gen. Barry McCaffrey blasts Trump’s ‘inexplicable’ policy in Syria.”

▪ Trump has publicly sided with Putin over U.S. intelligence in dismissing the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and suggested this year it would be “appropriate” for Russia to rejoin the Group of Seven richest countries — reversing the 2014 expulsion after Russia invaded Ukraine.

No Trump foreign policy move, however, has redounded so directly to Russia’s benefit as the Syrian pullout, with the Kurdish forces striking a deal with Russia. — Mike DeBonis and Seung Min Kim, “‘All roads lead to Putin’: Pelosi questions Trump’s loyalty in White House clash.”

▪ At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.

“It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”

He buttoned his suit coat, pursed his lips, squared his shoulders and dropped his arms rigidly at his sides. “Ladies and gentlemen of Texas,” he then droned in a sleep-inducing staccato monotone the way he imagined most of the other 44 presidents had done. “It is a great honor to be with you this evening.”

The crowd loved it, roaring with laughter. Transforming back into the unpresidential president America has come to know, Mr. Trump added, “And everybody would be out of here so fast! You wouldn’t come in in the first place!” Being presidential, he was saying, is so boring. Who wants that? — Peter Baker, “On Day 1001, Trump Made It Clear: Being ‘Presidential’ is Boring.”

▪ “This is unquestionably the most outstanding nomination that I’ve ever recommended to Presidents to serve on the bench in Kentucky,” Mitch McConnell tweeted in July, when Walker’s name first came up. However, the Senate Majority Leader made his endorsement to the detriment of the nonpartisan American Bar Association, which gave Walker a rare “not qualified rating.” The ABA suggests that “a nominee to the federal bench ordinarily should have at least 12 years’ experience in the practice of law” — not zero cases in court under their belt. In addition, Paul T. Moxley, chair of the ABA committee on the federal judiciary, issued the closest thing to an I Don’t Know Her that a lawyer can physically emit: “Based on review of his biographical information and conversations with Mr. Walker, it was challenging to determine how much of his ten years since graduation from law school has been spent in the practice of law. — Matt Steib, “As Trump Fumes, GOP Advances Real Party Goal of Making the Federal Judiciary Great Again.”

▪ “I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party. Because there’s no wing that’s very large that is aligned with me.” — Senator Mitt Romney, “Mitt Romney Marches Alone: ‘I don’t believe I’m leading a wing of the party.’“

▪ And, yes, among the unsettling items in today’s news, is one about the Democrats:

Democrats aren’t comfortable with the brutal language of unvarnished national interest. They aren’t comfortable acknowledging tragic tradeoffs between the welfare of ordinary Americans and the welfare of vulnerable people overseas. Donald Trump is. He genuinely doesn’t care what happens to the Kurds or the Afghans—or any other group of people who can’t offer him votes or money or project his image onto the side of a luxury hotel. Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Joe Biden do care, which is why they found it so easy to offer ferocious moral denunciations of Trump’s Syria policy at this week’s debate. They just don’t care enough to ask Americans to sacrifice to reduce the chances that Syria’s horrors repeat themselves in Afghanistan. — Peter Beinart, “Democrats are Hypocrites for Condemning Trump Over Syria: Presidential hopefuls blasted Trump for abandoning the Kurds — but want the U.S. to pull out of Afghanistan under similar conditions.“