President Donald Trump is fast making a warning many Democrats made before his election come true: that he would prove to be an utterly lawless president. Trump's disdain for not only federal law but the entire federal judiciary is becoming more and more apparent, and he's barely begun his second week back in office. He hasn't taken the final step in creating a completely unfettered and lawless executive branch, but at this point it seems only a matter of time before he does so.

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If President Donald Trump's agenda gets stalled in any way, it's going to happen because of dissent within his own Republican ranks. And one week in to Trump's second term, cracks are already appearing in the MAGA facade. How deep or wide those cracks may become is still an open question, but it certainly is interesting to see them appear so quickly.

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In just about every presidential election, the political punditry tries to frame what happened in it in the easiest possible way, sometimes pinning a win or loss on a certain demographic slice of the electorate (remember "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads"?) and sometimes putting the focus on a single oversimplified issue. One of the big themes in this regard for the last election was the price of eggs. True to form, they even slapped a cutesy label on it: voters were angry about "eggflation."

Which is why we sincerely hope that Donald Trump is asked about it as often as possible -- say, once a week, at a minimum -- now that he is president again. Because for all his promises, eggflation is going to be a very tough problem for him to solve.

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It's been clear for a while that the Republican Party has become completely amoral. Their partisanship has become more important to them than any quaint notions of right or wrong. To them, right versus left is all that matters.

Republicans now refuse to condemn pretty much anything that any other Republican does -- no matter how amoral -- starting at the top with President Donald Trump. The GOP has claimed for decades that they are the "law and order" party, but that all goes out the window when Trump pardons hundreds of people who assaulted police officers. Supporting cops is less important than supporting a fellow Republican. Morals are conveniently set aside whenever necessary.

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I mean that title facetiously, of course, since I have not recently committed any crimes for which I would need any sort of official pardon. But then, neither did Dr. Anthony Fauci.

But before I get to addressing the flurry of pardons issued this week by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump, I would like to dismiss one issue that has been raised in the midst of it all (indeed, because it is so easy to dismiss). Some have decided that "pardon reform" is now necessary, to rein in what is essentially an unchecked power of U.S. presidents.

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Well, that didn't take long. Hours after swearing an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, President Donald Trump issued an executive order which attempted to rewrite one part of that same Constitution. He did so unilaterally, without any action by Congress. Of course, neither Congress nor a U.S. president is actually capable of changing the Constitution's text on their own -- that would require a constitutional amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states' legislatures. But that pesky detail didn't stop Trump from trying.

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Today is a federal holiday to honor the memory of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. As I sometimes do, I thought today would be a good day to both reflect on King's life and what he stood for, while reading some of his own words.

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And so we come to the final Friday Talking Points of President Joe Biden's term in office.

It is perhaps appropriate that the funeral of Jimmy Carter happened in the midst of Biden winding down his final weeks. Because Joe Biden -- another one-term Democratic president like Jimmy -- will likely become more appreciated as time goes by, just as Carter was.

Joe Biden had a pretty spectacular first two years in office, in terms of getting legislation passed. Granted, he had a Democratic Congress to work with and the continuing crisis of a pandemic to spur the politicians to actually act. He used both to get a sweeping agenda passed which will have an impact for years to come. But he had to grapple with two corporate-friendly Democrats in the Senate who held him back from achieving an even-more-historic agenda. If the full "Build Back Better" plan had made it past Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, then Americans would doubtlessly feel a lot differently (and better) about government's role in their economic lives.

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Watching President Joe Biden's farewell address from the Oval Office last night was rather bittersweet. For me at least, it all had a flavor of "what might have been." But in the end, Biden's promised bridge to a new generation of leadership really led nowhere.

While campaigning early in 2020, Biden appeared on a stage with three other prominent Democrats, who were at the time "expected to be considered for the vice presidential nomination" -- Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, and Gretchen Whitmer. Biden said during this campaign event: "Look, I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else. There's an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country." While Biden never actually did explicitly promise to serve only a single term as president, many read his comments to mean exactly that -- Biden would defeat Donald Trump, run a bridging presidency, and then step aside and make way for a younger generation of Democrats to carry the torch forward.

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Hearings are now underway in the Senate on Donald Trump's various nominees to fill out his administration, but so far it has all felt like it is leading to a very foregone conclusion. American politics has gotten so tribal that Republicans are now willing to overlook just about anything for one of their own, no matter how deeply disqualifying such things would have been in the past. Trump will quite likely get almost all his picks confirmed, no matter what disturbing things exist in their past.

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