The end of the summer saw a dizzying deluge of shake-ups in the Trump administration, perhaps confirming what John Dickerson had claimed earlier in the year: “Donald Trump Is an Impossible Boss.” When Trump appointed Anthony Scaramucci to take on the communications director role in July, Press Secretary Sean Spicer promptly resigned. But Scaramucci only lasted 10 days in office, until John Kelly—who had just replaced Reince Priebus as chief of staff—fired him. Soon Steve Bannon, Trump’s “dark angel,” was on the outs, too. Trump was also taking to Twitter to criticize Jeff Sessions, his “beleaguered” attorney general. Instability in the West Wing and ongoing feuding made for what David A. Graham called “Trump’s Worst Week Yet.”

In August, Trump was criticized for his response to the deadly protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, by congressional Republicans and prominent business executives alike. After his first public remarks on the incident, Elaine Godfrey explained that his speech was revealing in what it left out. And when the president made another statement two days later, Rosie Gray argued that, by saying there were “some very fine people on both sides,” Trump had made his message clear: He was defending white nationalists.

On policy issues, Trump often passed the buck to Congress to get things done—including creating a legislative fix to DACA, which he had ended, negotiating a replacement for the Iran Deal, and paying out Obamacare subsidies. In regard to foreign policy, Trump promised he would inflict “fire and fury” on North Korea, which Uri Friedman found “stunning for several reasons.”

A slew of natural disasters served as yet another test for the new president. David A. Graham wrote that Hurricane Harvey exposed “Trump’s Empathy Deficit,” while James Fallows argued that Trump’s Twitter attacks on San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz in the wake of Hurricane Maria was “a significant step downward for him.”

Trump was getting combative in other arenas, too. After football star Colin Kaepernick—and then many others—knelt during the national anthem in protest, Trump began a “War of Words With Black Athletes”—an example of what Derek Thompson argued was the “Depressing Politicization of Everything.”

Trump’s “Unforced Error” in making claims about how his predecessors handled consoling Gold Star families and his attack of a grieving widow left his administration scrambling to try to cover up his mistakes, Taylor Hosking and I reported.

In The Atlantic’s October issue, writers assessed the administration: Ta-Nehisi Coates argued that Trump was “The First White President”; Jack Smith wrote that Trump was “testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors”; and Eliot A. Cohen explained how the new president was ruining America’s global standing.