“When you’re the father and your son’s entire career is dependent on that, they own you.”

— Donald Trump Jr., quoted by the Washington Post, suggesting Hunter Biden only had business opportunities due to his father’s name.

Washington Post: “Wednesday was the 1,000th day of Donald Trump’s presidency. He spent it the usual way, by saying unusual things.”

Mike Allen: “There have been many holy-crap-that-did-not-just-happen days in the Trump White House, but few top the soap opera of Oct. 16, 2019 — exactly Day 1,000 of the Trump presidency.”

Jonathan Bernstein: “Every once in a while, some event offers a clarifying reminder of the president’s poor judgment. On Wednesday, it was the release of a letter Trump wrote to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The letter itself was an embarrassment…”

“But what really underlined Trump’s problem for me wasn’t that he wrote an incompetent letter to follow up on what seems to have been an incompetent phone call. Or that his Syria policy has resulted in chaos and death. Or that, on a crass political level, he’s managed to alienate his congressional allies just as he needs them most, with House Republicans voting overwhelmingly on Wednesday to condemn his decision.”

“No, what really got to me was that Trump distributed copies of this letter to congressional leaders when they showed up at the White House for a briefing. Think of it. Even if the letter had been perfectly normal, what Trump was handing them was an Oct. 9 request to Erdogan to halt his invasion — a request that Erdogan has, as we’ve seen, totally ignored. Trump was bragging about what he considered to be a sign of his own brilliance without realizing that it was instead evidence of abject failure.”