The last time he was president, Donald Trump faced a big crisis. His response to the COVID-19 pandemic was erratic at best (and even that's being charitable). Later, he and his followers demonized the doctors and medical experts who were desperately trying to save lives with their advice and recommendations -- so threateningly that President Joe Biden felt the need to pre-emptively pardon Dr. Anthony Fauci right before he left office. Biden feared that Trump would harass Fauci via the Justice Department, so he precluded it from happening.

This time around, President Trump is pre-emptively taking a wrecking ball to the federal government's medical establishment, in what can only be called a war on medical science. It was telling, during the early months of the COVID crisis, that Trump kept complaining that we were doing "too much testing." The numbers of people infected and hospitalized and dying were shooting up dramatically, after Trump had promised the country that they wouldn't. The solution, as far as Trump was concerned, was to just stop testing everyone. That way, there wouldn't be any big numbers to alarm everyone. Hey presto! Problem solved!

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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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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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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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Maybe it's time to bring back the concept of adversaries settling their insults with a good old-fashioned duel? That's the thought I have been having while watching the flurry of playground tantrums and unrestrained bullying spewing forth from the highest ranks of MAGA supporters. Maybe Steve Bannon and Elon Musk should just count off ten paces and take potshots at each other -- they could even make it pay-per-view and make a fortune! Well... whomever was left alive might, at any rate.

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In an extraordinary confluence of events, America mourned one former president as his body lay in state in the United States Capitol, while another former (and soon-to-be-again) president was sentenced after being found guilty of 34 felonies by a jury. Jimmy Carter had become almost the personification of decency in his post-presidential life, while Donald Trump has always been the personification of something a lot more tawdry.

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Will TikTok be banned before Donald Trump even takes office? That is the question the Supreme Court will hear tomorrow. As things stand, a law will start to shut down TikTok in this country on the 19th, unless the company divests itself from ownership and control by the Chinese government. Which isn't very likely to happen in the next ten days. But the politics of the situation have been rather convoluted, so it's hard to predict what will happen or what the fallout will be in Washington.

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