“Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, told Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, to have the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration publicly disavow the forecasters’ position that Alabama was not at risk.” It probably won’t come as much a surprise, but the pressure to repudiate forecasters who contradicted the president’s bizarre Alabama hurricane warning came from the very top. (This is what they’re spending their time on…)

+ “It’s easy to wonder how he lasted as long as he did. It may be more important to wonder why he bothered at all.” The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins on the inevitable clash between John Bolton and Trump. “Trump seems to see the global arena as a kind of supersized real-estate market, where bluster prevails, even the worst people are persuadable, and, if your adversary isn’t giving you what you want, you walk away. It’s a simpleton’s view of the world, but in this case the simpleton has a five-hundred-ship Navy and sixteen hundred nuclear warheads at his disposal. Someone has to contain him.”