I think shit's getting real at the 1600. The president keeps looking into that big bag of fcks and, dammit, as The New York Times reports, if he still doesn't find it to be empty.

"The question they have to ask themselves is: If you are repeatedly having to say in very strong terms that what he has said is unacceptable, why are you still endorsing him?" Mr. Obama said at a news conference at the White House. Mr. Obama said that in addition to Mr. Trump's comments about the Khan family, the Republican nominee had demonstrated that he was "woefully unprepared to do this job." The president said Mr. Trump lacked knowledge about Europe, the Middle East and Asia. "This isn't a situation where you have an episodic gaffe. This is daily," Mr. Obama added. "There has to be a point at which you say, this is not somebody I can support for president of the United States, even if he purports to be a member of my party. The fact that that has not yet happened makes some of these denunciations ring hollow."

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I sometimes think this guy is going to leave office without enough people appreciating what a truly great partisan politician he is. Of course, he came to prominence with his speeches about how we, as Americans, can transcend our political differences and ride off together in glory. I cheered those speeches, too, although I thought he was dead wrong. There was all that "reaching across the aisle," and rumors of the Grand Bargain early on in his administration. But, for going on four decades now, I've studied several breeds of partisan politicians in their native habitat here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), and I never have seen one with the kind of perfect timing the president has.

Look at what he just did, standing there with the president of Singapore, who must be baffled as to how this country ever came to the prominence it did, what with the kind of unmoored yahoos who can get nominated for high office. The president deftly dropped the harshest overhand right an incumbent president can drop on a contender—and this after a weekend in which said contender was reeling all over the landscape, yapping about fire marshals. And, at the same time, just at the moment when this reeling and yapping was forcing people like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan into the "deplore-but-not-renounce" two-step, he threw an elbow at them, too. This wasn't the East Room. This was the Octagon. Step up or tap out, boys.

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

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It's been a long time since we had an incumbent president who actively campaigned for the person he wanted to succeed him. Teddy Roosevelt pushed hard for William Howard Taft, and then regretted the hell out of it thereafter, and even tried to beat him four years later. Eisenhower held Nixon at arm's length, the way you carry a snake, as any reasonable person would. Hubert Humphrey had to spend three months running all the way from LBJ. (This had the added drawback of being part of why Johnson sat on the recorded proof of Nixon's treachery regarding the Vietnam Peace Talks in Paris.) Nixon was gone by 1976. Jimmy Carter only had one term. Ronald Reagan was cognitively functional for about three hours a day when George H.W. Bush ran to succeed him in 1988. Al Gore stupidly benched Bill Clinton, and C-Plus Augustus was a harborless plague ship drifting through the campaign in 2008.

Now, though, we have a young, vigorous, and gifted president, with a big old empty bag of fcks to give, and plainly spoiling for a fight with a guy in whose head he rented a space at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, and a space that the president now has converted to an AirBnB for any Democratic politician who wants to drop by for a few days. Which is not to say that what the president said today was not serious. He, Trump is more unqualified for the office than anyone who ever ran for it. But, damn, it was old-school, too.

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