The administration of President Donald Trump is showing us all, in real time, how not to tackle a widespread medical crisis. Because things are moving so quickly, though, it's tough to tell how much of their woefully inadequate response has been the fault of Donald Trump himself, Trump's scorn for experts of any type who know more things than he does (a category which includes many people, for obvious reasons), or Trump's advisors and aides who have been put in charge of a massive problem but whose main worry seems to be not ever contradicting Trump in public (no matter how wrong Trump gets things). It all adds up to making a bad situation much worse, which is precisely where we find ourselves now. Decisions are made for political reasons, or -- worse -- to avoid making Trump himself look bad in any way. This has shattered the confidence of the stock market, as evidenced by today's record-busting 3,000-point drop. The more time goes by, the more Trump's inadequacies are becoming impossible to ignore, even by his staunchest supporters. Donald Trump, quite obviously, does not have a clue what to do next, is instead out there blatantly lying about the situation on a daily basis, and we're all going to suffer as a direct result. No wonder the market's tanking.

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Roman Emperor Nero didn't actually fiddle while Rome burned. It's a myth. Violins (or "fiddles") wouldn't exist for another 1,500 years or so, making the very concept impossible. That's not to say Nero might not have blatantly ignored a flaming crisis, of course, it's just quibbling about the literal meaning of the maxim. Now, American Emperor-With-No-Clothes Donald Trump didn't fiddle while the country was hit by a pandemic, either. Instead, he played golf. Twice. That's right -- in the midst of a huge crisis, Trump spent the entire weekend playing golf.

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While the biggest political spectacle of the week was the president's big speech to Congress, the biggest political news of the week was actually the American economy reacting to Donald Trump's on-again-off-again, now-you-see-them-now-you-don't tariffs. The whiplash began at the start of the week and hasn't fully subsided yet. Taken together with all of Trump's other disruptive wrecking balls, economists are now starting to talk about the possibility of an upcoming "Trump recession."

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I have to begin this review with the mandatory bit of pedantry which is required every four years. Last night, President Donald Trump gave a speech to a joint session of Congress. However, it was not technically a "State Of The Union" speech, since tradition dictates you have to have been in office for a whole year before giving one of those.

Nitpickery aside, let's do a quick review of how things went last night, shall we?

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Remember when the Republican Party, as a whole, absolutely revered the memory of Ronald Reagan? It really wasn't that long ago. Their devotion was so pronounced that we even took to using the term "Saint Ronald of Reagan" whenever we wrote about Republicans lauding him to the skies, just to poke fun at their deification (or at the least, canonization or beatification) of a politician that, in our humble opinion, really didn't deserve such devotion.

Jumping forward to the present, each incoming president gets to choose how to decorate the White House, which includes the art on the walls of the Oval Office. We have to say it was somewhat of a surprise to learn that Donald Trump in his second presidency chose to hang a painting of Reagan on the wall overlooking the same desk Ronnie used to sit behind. We learned this fact from the following article, which (please note) was written before what just happened in the Oval Office today:

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I start today with a bit of mineralogical history. The Washington Monument on the National Mall was built both before and after the Civil War, and was finally finished in 1884. At the top of America's obelisk sits a pyramid, with observation windows visitors can look out of. The very tippy-top of this stone pyramid (roughly 555 feet above ground -- at the time, the tallest building in the world) was capped with a small pyramid made out of metal (which doubles as the contact point for the monument's lightning rod). The metal used was one of the rarest available at the time -- so rare that it was as expensive as silver. This small pyramid weighs 100 ounces, and at the time was the largest cast piece of this metal in the world. So what was this extremely rare metal?

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There are some jobs where, if the job is done perfectly, the public is never even aware there is a person doing that job. The only time people notice them is when a screw-up happens. The job of projectionist at a movie theater is a good example. If he or she runs the projector perfectly and there are no problems, then no one in the audience gives them a second thought (or even a first thought). They are invisible -- but the movie wouldn't run without them. The sound mixer at a live concert is another good example. If the sound is mixed well and all the equipment functions perfectly, then nobody even notices them. But if something's wrong, then everyone turns around and starts yelling at them.

There are a lot of governmental jobs that fall into this category as well. Which has left me wondering what is going to happen when a whole bunch of them get fired (or quit in disgust) and then a screw-up happens?

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It's hard, as each new week goes by, not to get distracted by all of the chaos emanating from Washington. This week, we're going to begin by connecting a few dots that really need connecting, and (so far) haven't gotten enough attention (in our humble opinion).

Before Donald Trump became president again, both he and his MAGA choir spent a lot of time decrying "censorship" and wailing about their "free speech" being somehow suppressed. This was largely due to social media sites policing their allowable content, and occasionally removing objectionable or flat-out false posts and even kicking people off their platforms.

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Robert F. Kennedy Junior is now going to be in charge of overseeing the nation's health systems. This seems to be a prime example of the ironic question: "What could possibly go wrong with that?" since Kennedy is so obviously not even remotely qualified for the position, and he holds so many bizarre and conspiratorial viewpoints on health care and medicine that HuffPost ran the story with a main-page "screamer" headline: "Quack Confirmed!" If anything, calling R.F.K. Jr. a "quack" is an understatement of the reality.

But today I am in a ra

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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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