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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Donald Trump is a master at deflecting attention. Over and over again, he trots out some outrageous idea or catchphrase, and the media all goes chasing after it because they seemingly can't help themselves. Meanwhile, the things Trump is actually doing don't get much attention, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Case in point is Trump suddenly championing a twenty-first century American "Manifest Destiny," where he has set his sights on three pieces of real estate he'd like to add to the United States: Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Spoiler alert: none of these are serious proposals. None will actually happen. And yet they are being treated seriously (or at least semi-seriously) by people who really should know better by now.

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Welcome back to the second of our year-end awards columns! And if you missed it last Friday, go check out [Part 1] as well.

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It must be a slow news month. That's the obvious explanation. But then "obvious explanations" aren't exactly newsworthy, or maybe just not entertaining enough, perhaps. It's much more fun to present all kinds of wild theories, isn't it? Which, again, is the obvious explanation for why the mainstream media keeps (pun definitely intended) droning on and on.

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Everybody ready? Here is the first installment of our year-end awards, with our obligatory nod to The McLaughlin Group television show for coming up with these categories.

As always, it's a marathon. It's really, really long. Don't say you weren't warned! And since it is so long, that's all the introduction we're going to bother with.

Ready?... everyone buckle up... here we go....

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The Oxford English Dictionary has announced that their Word Of The Year for this year was "brain rot." Their definition: "Supposed deterioration of a person's mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. (Also: Something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration)." Hey, we can relate to that concept....

Speaking of rotting brains (a wonderful segue if there ever was one), Donald Trump continues to fill out his administration, nominating more and more sexual predators, total incompetents, billionaires, and complete clowns (those categories are not mutually exclusive, we should point out). A "team of ribalds" for the ages, it seems.

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Since it's going to be a short holiday week anyway, I though today was a good day to wallow in grammatical pedantry. Because I have a nit to pick with America's media editors. So fair warning to all -- today's column is about nothing more than me being linguistically annoying.

Elon Musk, Donald Trump's "first buddy" (as he calls himself), is going to team up with Vivek Ramaswamy to set up a group to slash government spending. The moniker Musk picked for this group is a misnomer, since it won't actually be a federal "department" of anything, but Musk reverse-engineered the name to boost his favored cryptocurrency anyway, coming up with the "Department Of Government Efficiency," or "DOGE."

That's the way I have been capitalizing it, at any rate. Because I apparently have different standards than everyone else in the editorial world.

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Well, that was quick. As many have amusingly pointed out, the nomination of Matt Gaetz to be Donald Trump's attorney general didn't even last a full Scaramucci. Eight days, from beginning to end, was all it took. It's more than he deserved, really.

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The circus has come to town, and performing in the center ring this week was the teeny-tiny clown car which disgorged a continuing parade of clowns, each more outlandish than the last.

Or, to put things another way: get ready for lots more circus/clown metaphors in the very near future. It's really the only possible way to describe Donald Trump selecting his cabinet. But we'll get to the individual clowns in a moment, because first we've got to take a broader view of what Trump's up to here.

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Few have commented on it since the Democratic National Convention last year, but to me there were some striking parallels between the election of 2024 and that of 1968. The biggest of these? A sitting Democratic president declined to finish his effort to win re-election, so the party had to rally around an alternative candidate late in the cycle -- who went on to lose. But that's not the only parallel. In 1968, America was mired down in a proxy war in Vietnam. Young people faced being drafted and sent off to fight and possibly die halfway around the world, and neither political party seemed to have any answer to the situation that didn't include a whole lot more of the same. This is where the parallel is not exact, because nothing like that is happening today.

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