Mr Trump also finds himself trailing behind Democratic 2020 candidates Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg by double-digit margins on Wednesday, according to the latest poll from ABC News/Washington Post.
Perhaps worst of all, the president’s ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the impeachment probe, has revised his own testimony, admitting a quid pro quo was behind the decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine and that the administration only planned to release the money in exchange for new president Volodymyr Zelensky announcing an anti-corruption probe into Mr Biden.
The day proceeded with Democrats announcing the first set of public impeachment hearings for next week.
Then, testimony from William Taylor was released in full, showing a worrisome situation for the president.
Trump impeachment: Who's who in the Ukraine scandal
Trump has reportedly approved an expanded US military mission to secure an expanse of oil fields across eastern Syria.
The president’s actions raise a number of legal questions about whether American troops can launch attacks against Syrian, Russian or other forces if they threaten the oil but, after meeting with defence leaders on Friday, he decided to go ahead with the call to commit servicepeople to defending a large swath of land controlled by Syrian Kurdish fighters stretching from Deir Ezzor to al-Hassakeh.
This comes despite Trump’s promise to get the bulk of the more than 1,200 American soldiers out of the country.
Trump spoke with Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador last night to condemn the killing of nine members of an American Mormon family in an ambush on a dirt road in Bavispe, Sonora, to the north of the country. Three US mothers, twin babies and four other children were murdered in the incident.
"President Trump made clear that the United States condemns these senseless acts of violence that took the lives of nine American citizens and offered Mexico assistance to ensure the perpetrators face justice," deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
Earlier in the day, Trump had offered US forces to help Mexico "wage war" on the drug cartels by tweet in response to the attack.
That offer that was politely rejected by Obrador who said at press conference: “We are very grateful to President Trump - to any foreign government which wants to help - but in these cases we have to act independently and according to our constitution, and in line with our tradition of independence and sovereignty.”
"War is synonymous with irrationality. We are for peace.”
A little more on the Republicans' impeachment fightback stragegy as Trump and his legal team reportedly work to organise a defence that will rely heavily on White House attorneys and congressional GOP members staving off the threat to his presidency.
Democrats consider the upcoming public hearings to be their best chance at putting the president's behaviour on display for the benefit of the American people before a politically fraught impeachment vote. Trump's allies, for their part, see the hearings as an opportunity to fight their man's corners and push the idea the inquiry is an establishment conspiracy. The political lens through which both sides are viewing the hearings is informing the president's legal strategy, according to Trump's supporters.
The White House counsel's office is currently expected to take the lead in mounting the president's defence, according to a person familiar with the legal strategy who spoke anonymously to the AP. The arrangement will put government attorneys, rather than the president's personal lawyers, on the front lines of Trump's attempt to fend off Democratic efforts to remove him from office.
The White House attorneys will be bolstered by the roster of GOP lawmakers like the aforementioned Jordan and Meadows and Matt Gaetz and Steve Scalise, who have already been serving as the president's de facto defence counsel in closed-door hearings.
Transcripts of depositions released this week show Republican lawmakers taking steps to try to undermine the credibility of witnesses in the impeachment inquiry. Other legislators have sought to publicly unmask the whistleblower whose summer complaint served as the catalyst for the impeachment probe.
Further involvement by the lawyers is expected once hearings move to the Judiciary Committee as the rules established by the House vote last week permit them to attend. Additionally, the president's counsel is to be granted access to the committee's evidence and granted the ability to question witnesses. The White House official dismissed the idea that the president would attend.
The decision to put the counsel's office out in front in responding to the impeachment inquiry was reportedly made because the congressional probe centers on actions that Trump took as president. That's in contrast to the impeachment inquiry into Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, which involved allegations that he lied about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky and sought to obstruct an investigation into the affair.
It gives Trump the image of being represented by the White House counsel, rather than private attorneys whose prominence in the proceedings, they believe, might diminish his stature. It also keeps the legal team that still includes embattled former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani away from the spotlight.
In the first year of FBI special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, the administration added a special in-house lawyer, Ty Cobb, to respond to prosecutors' requests for documents and interviews with White House staff. Cobb was later replaced by another attorney, Emmet Flood. The president also relied on a team of personal attorneys, including Giuliani, to handle negotiations with Mueller's team on matters such as terms for an interview.
"The rationale is correct as far as it goes, but I also think that there's good reason to not have the White House counsel's office take the lead on this," said Timothy Flanigan, a former deputy counsel to George W Bush. "The White House counsel's office has a lot to do. It's not clear to me that it's always a good idea for the White House counsel to get involved in a project of this magnitude."
Still, there can be benefits in having the counsel's office intimately involved in an investigation like this, simply by virtue of familiarity with the events. "They've obviously spent a lot of time with whatever documents there are and whatever information there is," Flanigan said.
Trump's supporters, meanwhile, can be expected to try to minimise the threat of the impeachment inquiry by casting the Mueller probe as one that was more perilous in nature. They aim to paint impeachment as a done deal given the Democratic majority in the House and argue that any outcome short of removal of the president through conviction in the Senate is a victory for Trump.
California's Supreme Court is considering today whether Trump must disclose his tax returns if he wants to be a candidate in the state's primary election next spring. The high court is hearing arguments even though a federal judge already temporarily blocked the state law requiring presidential candidates to release their tax returns in order to be included in the state's primary.
The justices' consideration comes the same week that a federal appeals court in New York ruled that Trump's tax returns can be turned over to state criminal investigators there, although that ruling is expected to be appealed to the US Supreme Court.
The California Republican Party and chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson filed the state lawsuit challenging Democratic governor Gavin Newsom's signing in July of the law aimed at the Republican president.
Newsom, incidentally, feuded publically with the president over the weekend after Trump threatened to pull federal funding being used to help tackle the state's wildfire crisis.
The tax returns law is a clear violation of the California Constitution, opponents argued, citing a 1972 voter-approved amendment they said guarantees that all recognised candidates must be on the ballot. Previously, "California politicians rigged the primary election, putting up 'favorite son' nominees for partisan political advantage," they wrote, suggesting that Democratic lawmakers are doing the same thing now by different means.
The opponents said keeping Trump off the ballot could lower voter turnout in the primary, hurting Republican legislative and congressional candidates' chances of reaching the general election. That's because California's top-two primary system sends the two highest vote-getters in the primary to the general election regardless of party. But the state's lawyers said it's a common-sense requirement so that voters can gauge candidates' "financial status and honesty concerning financial matters."
The justices sped up their usual timetable to hear the arguments because the deadline to file tax returns for California's 3 March presidential primary would be 26 November if the law survives. But the state's appeal of the federal judge's order will extend past that deadline, with the next court filings not due to the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals until December. State officials would not say why they have not sought a faster review or if that means they are giving up on getting Trump's returns in time for next year's election.
Most major Democratic presidential candidates already publicly disclosed their personal income tax returns. Trump broke with decades of tradition in refusing to release his returns, citing an ongoing Internal Revenue Service audit.
California was the first state to require political candidates to disclose their personal income tax returns. New York state passed a law giving congressional committees access to Trump's state tax returns, which Trump has also challenged in court.
The situation in the New York case is much different, with the appeals court ruling that Trump's tax returns can be turned over to a grand jury that would usually keep them from public view.
Manhattan district attorney Cyrus R Vance Jr is seeking the returns as part of a broader investigation that includes payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy centerfold Karen McDougal, both of whom claim they had affairs with the president before the 2016 presidential election.
Trump's short-lived press secretary turned regular nuisance Anthony Scaramucci was on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning and had some damning things to say about his erstwhile employer and his 2020 prospects.
Ace satirist and all-round genius Armando Iannucci has been explaining why he declined offers from Hollywood studios to turn the Trump tweet below into a blockbuster film.
“I just didn’t want to spend a year with Donald Trump,” he told Deadline.
Trump's first tweet of the day is very much what you'd expect - defiant and divorced from reality.
Here's Zamira Rahim with more on last night's humiliation in Kentucky, doubly embarrassing for the president after his plea to voters at his Lexington rally on Monday.
Whatever Trump says, Democrat Andy Bearshear's election as governor is surely a crushing development for the state senator and chief Trump enabler Mitch McConnell, who must begin to wonder whether his grasp on a once-reliable red state is slipping.
Democratic 2020 front-runner Joe Biden, who struggled somewhat to get his message across in Iowa over the weekend, has hit out at one of his chief rivals, Elizabeth Warren, labelling her a "condescending elitist" and attacking her brand of "my way or the highway" politics in a Medium post.
Don Jr's attempt to defend his father against accusations he is racist in his new book is making waves for the wrong reasons.
The president's eldest son explains in Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us that his old man cannot be racist because he allowed Jr and his brother Eric to play video games with Michael Jackson (!) during their adolescence.
So that's all right then.
That would be the same book, incidentally, that Trump has spent 2020 campaign funds bulk ordering to shill to supporters.
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