The American presidency is being dumbed-down before our very eyes. It's as if we're all trapped within one of those "child in an adult body" movies (think: Big or Freaky Friday), awaiting the next wacky turn of events to play out across our screens. What will "Kid President" do next? Throw a tantrum on Twitter? Fire somebody else at the White House? Yell at his subordinates again? Try to fire Congress? Cause an international incident by doing something extremely rude while meeting the Pope? Stay tuned, the next unbelievable plot twist is right around the corner!

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I thought it'd be fun today to take a look at President Donald Trump's poll numbers. This is mainly because any casual interpretation of such polling would have to conclude that Trump's numbers are about to fall off a cliff. So I thought it'd be fun to take a "before" snapshot, to see where Trump was before the whole "telling secrets to Russia in the Oval Office" thing is reflected in his job approval polling. Over the next week or two, the impact of this week's scandal will become clear, but for now the polling data doesn't reflect any of it.

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The war against the Islamic State, currently being waged (to varying degrees) by the United States, Iraq, Iraqi Kurds, Iran, Syria, Syrian Kurds, Syrian Rebels, Turkey, and Russia is approaching a big turning point. The Islamic State has been steadily losing territory for over a year now, and they're on the brink of losing control over the two most important cities in their self-proclaimed caliphate: Mosul and Raqqa. This could be a death blow to the Islamic State's territorial claims, although the group itself will probably survive as a stateless international terrorist organization (much like Al Qaeda).

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This week will go down in American political history as the week people stopped comparing Donald Trump to Andrew Jackson, and instead began comparing Trump to a different Oval Office predecessor, Richard Nixon. If we had a dollar for every time the word "Nixonian" was written or uttered onscreen this week, we could retire tomorrow.

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There must be something to the myths, though, even if only in a Jungian-archetypical kind of way. Because they certainly still remain with us. In today's world, of course, they are not dressed in motley (well, some less so than others...); and instead of a perch near the throne, they crack wise on television shows to an audience of millions. They are our late-night comedians. Two of them were in the news earlier this week, but before I get to Monday night's performances by Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers, I'd like to confess my own evolution in favor of our modern court jesters.

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Donald Trump hasn't even been in office for four whole months, and already he's being compared to Richard Nixon. That is both stunning as well as somewhat expected, really. Just on personality alone, Trump seems the most Nixonian figure to occupy the Oval Office since Tricky Dick himself roamed the hallways. Sooner or later, Trump's penchant for vengeance against his perceived enemies was going to cause some problems. It's now obvious that "sooner" won out over "later."

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I had an article all ready to go today, and then I took a quick peek at the news. Which caused me to go back and start all over again. Because James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has just been fired. Obviously, I'm not going to have any in-depth analysis, since this happened less than an hour ago (as I write this).

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Today, arguments were heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals over President Donald Trump's revised travel ban on a handful of Muslim countries. Next week, the Ninth Circuit will chime in as well. But we're fast approaching the point where the entire argument becomes irrelevant, to both sides.

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Instead of using his last name (which he loves), why not use a diminutive version of his first name (which he apparently hates) instead? Add in his last name's initial, and it becomes: "DonTcare." Personally, we feel this perfectly captures the entire Democratic argument, using only eight letters: Donald T's "don't care what's in it, don't care how many of my voters it will screw, as long as Congress passes some bill or another so I can brag about it!" health care plan. DonTcare. Rolls off the tongue, don't it? Well, typing it does take some getting used to -- but without that second capitalization, it'd be a lot harder to read. Trump DonTcare. And while we certainly can't claim credit for coining the term, we do encourage others to use it freely -- it even saves characters in tweets!

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In all the news articles triggered by the House passing the Republican "American Health Care Act" (A.H.C.A.), one quote prominently stood out. From an article written by David Weigel in the Washington Post came this extraordinary quote:

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