Breaking news! Katie Zacharia is out as White House press secretary, after only five days on the job. This is notable because she lasted only half a "Scaramucci" -- the previous minimal measurement adopted for longevity in the Trump administration (after Anthony Scaramucci only lasted 11 days in the same job). "The Mooch" responded to the news by posting: "Records are made to be broken. But I take no pleasure in other people's pain." From now on, one assumes, the question will be properly framed: "Do you think he/she will last a full Scaramucci, or only a single Zacharia?"

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I've been dreading writing this article and have been putting it off for weeks (because it truly is such a distasteful and depressing subject to even contemplate), but today Reuters essentially wrote the article for me, so I can just summarize their findings and add in a bit of my own commentary.

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Far from making America "great" again, Donald Trump has instead made America (and himself) a worldwide laughingstock. This week, a statue was unveiled in the European Parliament building that portrayed a naked golden Trump sitting on top of the shoulders of a struggling man. The text on the base of the statue read:

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I am beginning to feel something that I haven't felt for a long time in politics: optimism. Cautious optimism, to be sure, but still hoping the future is going to turn positive rather than negative. I say this with exactly four weeks to go until the midterm congressional elections.

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Let's begin this week with a stunner of a statement -- one that you might not have noticed in the news: Donald Trump apparently now wants to sell weapons to China.

The mainstream media has been doing a pathetically bad job of covering Trump for over a decade now, but you would think that news of this magnitude would have broken through. You'd be wrong about that, for the most part. The fact that the president of the United States is even contemplating selling weapons to China, at any other point in modern history, would have been a blockbuster of a story. All the other politicians would be weighing in on the subject (hopefully, to denounce it as a monumentally stupid idea). Pundits would be talking about it for weeks. But it was such a minor story that it appeared as a tiny blip and then sank like a stone beneath all the other idiocy emanating from the White House.

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This week, the Supreme Court actually did the right thing. That statement shouldn't be as astonishing as it is, but these days it is a rather rare thing to behold. The justices ruled that Donald Trump's scheme to hand the U.S. Postal Service extraordinary powers to determine which mail-in ballots were acceptable and which were not was unconstitutional and therefore could not be implemented before this year's midterm elections (which are roughly a month and a half away).

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Rahm Emanuel has apparently launched his 2028 presidential bid. A wonky story about him appeared prominently in today's Washington Post, on the subject of his ideas for fixing education in America. He also recently tossed out a different provocative idea during a recent speech, which further indicates he is in the process of building a political platform to run on. Rahm Emanuel is one of those politicians with an outsized opinion of his own popularity and a strong conviction that the country is ready for him to lead it. That's nothing new -- people like that are a dime a dozen in Washington -- but his new idea is certainly an interesting one: instituting a mandatory retirement age for everyone in the federal government.

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The midterm congressional elections will happen in early November, which is now less than four months away. Trump has already been making drastic moves (such as firing all the members of a federal elections security board) seemingly designed to sow chaos (or worse) when the ballots are cast. Which is why tonight's speech is so worrisome. And which is why I felt the need to run the following column again. Trump's Big Lie is poisonous to American democracy, which is why I am not exactly looking forward to tonight's speech.

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As one of the last decisions the Supreme Court handed down in this year's term, they upheld the concept of "birthright citizenship" enshrined within the Fourteenth Amendment. Barely.

The stunning thing wasn't the ruling, which was expected. The truly stunning thing is that the decision was partly 6-3 and partly 5-4. It should have been at least 7-2, with the only dissenters being Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas (who always vote the way Republicans want them to vote, no matter how clear the legal evidence is on the other side). Honestly, the decision should really have been 9-0, since the case is so cut and dried. Having it only 6-3 (or 5-4) shows that too many conservative judges are complete hypocrites when they swear up and down that they are "originalists" or "textualists" who only take into account what the Constitution (or any amendment) meant by the people who drafted it. Whenever that lofty principle becomes inconvenient in a case, too many of the conservatives just start making stuff up instead of reading the clear and unequivocal language of a law or an amendment.

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It is darkly ironic that we are only a few weeks away from celebrating the 250th anniversary of declaring independence from a king while our own Supreme Court continues to advance a vision of American government where the president has powers that can only be described as kinglike. They don't call it that -- they use the term "unitary executive" instead -- but the upshot is the same.

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