Throughout his entire presidency, Donald Trump has continued to top himself in the category of "most intense week ever." Over and over again, people thought: "Well, that's it -- he'll never sink lower than this," only to have this turn out to be mere wishful thinking, when the following week turns out to be even worse.

So why was anyone surprised when Trump rolled out his "season finale" (and "series finale," one would like to hope) of his made-for-television presidency in the first week of January? We all knew that whatever the end would look like, it would be spectacular (or, perhaps, "spectacularly bad"). And here we are.

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That headline is meant to evoke an earlier phrase from American history which (even before a book and subsequent movie popularized the term) denoted one of the most existentially-dangerous times in not just our country's history, but in that of the entire world: the "thirteen days in October" of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy was informed that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear-tipped missiles a mere 80 miles from the United States, and he began a series of moves which could very well have ended up as the start of World War III. This is not an overstatement or exaggeration. If open hostilities had broken out during the height of the Cold War, it is almost certain (especially seeing what caused the crisis in the first place) that there would have been an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. For 13 days, from October 16 to 28, 1962, the world teetered on the edge of all-out nuclear war. Thankfully, sanity prevailed, and both sides agreed to face-saving measures which ended with the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy gambled, he gambled big, and he won.

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