Charlie Cook: “If you wanted to offer a graduate-school class in how not to be an effective president of the United States, Donald Trump could write the textbook and teach the course.”

“The first lesson would be to cater myopically to your base, alienating those in your party who are not in your core constituency—particularly the congressional leadership and power players who would be the ones instrumental to actually getting anything done. The second lesson would be to offend independent voters, those not married to either party who are at least theoretically open to the arguments from both sides. Finally, the third lesson would be to do everything possible to eliminate any chance of getting defections from the ranks of the other party while riling up the other party’s base, giving them an intensity that they may have lacked when they lost last year’s election.”

“That’s pretty much how you would do it—and it’s what Trump has done.”

New York Times: “The moderates in Mr. Trump’s midst, Gary Cohn in particular, are somewhat less influential these days, after several expressed their disgust at the president’s response to the racial riots in Charlottesville, Va., last month.”

“Donald Trump the deal maker heads into the autumn of his first year in as weak a negotiating position as any president in modern times — desperate for a victory yet hardly near consensus on any major priority, still able to dominate the national conversation but so far incapable of translating that into action,” the New York Times reports.

“A summer of tumult marked by staff shake-ups, legislative failures, intraparty feuds, a racially inflammatory controversy and a nuclear-edged war of words has left him at odds with his own Republican Party and supported by barely a third of the American public. The list of daunting challenges has only grown with little sense of how he plans to tackle them beyond Twitter storms and declarations of determination.”

James Hohmann: “Once again, there is fear among top Republicans on Capitol Hill that Trump is setting them up to be the fall guys. If something doesn’t get done, the president will blame them.”

“Mitch? Are you there?”

— President Trump, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, on a call with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who had stopped responding to his “chatter about the day’s headlines or what he had seen on TV.”