If you'll check a historic calendar (which is easy enough to do), you will clearly see that there are three possible days which could validly be celebrated as marking the end of World War II. They are: August 14th, August 15th, or September 2nd. The initial announcement of the surrender of Japan was made on August 14th, in Japan. Due to the nature of time zones, this happened when it was August 15th in America already. Then the formal surrender, which happened on the deck of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri, was signed on September 2nd. The president at the time, Harry Truman, announced the United States would celebrate what was known as "V-J Day" (for "Victory over Japan Day") on September 2nd. So that would be the most likely day you'd expect any subsequent American president to announce as a new semi-holiday, since it was when World War II actually officially ended. But you'd be wrong.

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Donald Trump hit two milestones this past week: his first 100 days in office, and his first quarter of negative G.D.P. growth. True to form, he celebrated the first of these with a rally, while blaming the second on Joe Biden. He even tried to front-load any bad economic news in the second quarter as Biden's fault too. Oh, and for good measure, Trump expressed a desire to become the next pope. Which would probably be fine with plenty of Americans -- as long as he quits his current job in order to do so.

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Which brings us to Trump's strongest point, albeit one where his polling is also falling fast. On the subject of the southern border, the public does approve of what Trump has been doing. But on the larger subject of immigration, Trump is underwater in most polls, after starting out his term with those numbers in the positive ranges.

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Donald Trump's first 100 days of his second term as president has been a real horrorshow. I use this term deliberately, mostly because it can be used in two opposing ways... at least, if you either speak Russian or are a fan of Anthony Burgess. It can be used in the traditional English meaning of "something that is difficult to deal with or watch because it is so bad or unpleasant." It can also be used as Nadsat future-teen slang from the novel (and film) A Clockwork Orange, where it was borrowed (Anglicized) from the Russian word khorosho -- which actually means "good." So how you personally use it will depend on how you see Trump.

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What exactly is the point of the Trump trade war? Asking this question to different people in the White House gets you different answers, and Trump himself (as usual) contradicts himself almost daily, attempting to have things both ways. The clueless nature of the entire exercise is becoming more and more apparent as the first week of the Trump trade war draws to a close.

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That headline is obviously meant as a callback to a time when Republicans expressed all kinds of alarm about top secret information being mishandled by high-ranking government officials. In particular, Hillary Clinton's emails. Republicans in Congress gleefully investigated Clinton's email server and what had been sent via a non-standard communications channel -- six ways to Sunday, in fact. They denounced the breach of national security in the strongest possible terms. Later, it became the go-to "whataboutism" response to just about anything Democrats would bring up in relation to just about any Republican. The phrase: "But what about her emails?" or just: "But her emails!" became such a cliché that it was even mockingly morphed (by elision) into merely: "Butter emails!"

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We aren't even three weeks in to the administration of President Elon Musk, and already he has instituted an ideological purge the likes of which America has not seen since the time of Senator Joe McCarthy. Except this time they're not rooting out communists (or suspected communists, or communist sympathizers) but instead just "people they don't like." Or maybe "people who have pissed off Elon" -- that's probably closer to the reality of it.

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This is what having "no adults in the room" looks like. This is what a president surrounding himself with yes-men (and a few yes-women) while firing anyone who tells him "No" truly looks like. Donald Trump is president, but it now appears he doesn't just want to be a king, he wants to be an emperor. He wants to revive the American empire worldwide by the addition of several properties (by force, if necessary). His new bright idea was unveiled last night -- he now wants to own the Gaza Strip. It wouldn't become the 51st American state, but more like the 54th (behind Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal, assumably). This idea is so bonkers it staggers the imagination just to even consider it. But, because the president of the United States introduced it, people now have to think about it.

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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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Donald Trump's "Day One" in office is now less than two weeks away. He promised American voters a lot of action on his first day, but in the past few weeks he seems inordinately focused on some rather odd (one might say: "downright bizarre") goals. He has become a big fan of expanding America in what can only be called imperialistic fashion -- adding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to the American map. Today he floated a new idea, this one not a land-grab but instead of a sort of water-grab: he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," for no particular reason (other than to annoy Mexico, one assumes).

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