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 rather good mood for no particular reason, so I won't be pointing out what every other sane journalist who respects actual science is now busily pointing out, since as mentioned it is so patently obvious that R.F.K. Jr. should have been summarily dismissed by the Senate rather than confirmed into a position of power. Instead, I am (for once) going to follow that motherly advice most of us got at one point or another in our lives: "If you can't say something nice about somebody, don't say anything at all." This maxim is normally almost impossible to follow while commenting on politics, which is why in my many years of political blogging it may be the first time I've ever quoted it (I'd have to check).

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Democrats have a political opening right now to reach out to a demographic group that they've all but given up on in recent years: farmers and other people who live in rural areas. These areas have increasingly become Republican strongholds, but with Elon Musk running roughshod over government programs, there is an opening for Democrats to make some inroads -- or, at the very least, get these people to pick up the phone and call their representatives and push back on what Musk is doing.

The hard, cold fact that many Republicans prefer to ignore -- and that people like Elon Musk don't even understand (yet) -- is that "government spending" flows to real people. It's not some big dragon to be slain, it is part of tens of millions of Americans' livelihoods. Whether these are employees of a contractor that supplies the government with something or another, or retirees who get Social Security checks each month, or American farmers -- people benefit from government spending and yanking it away and replacing it with nothing means drastic changes to people's income and lives.

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As metaphors go, "low-hanging fruit" is a pretty easy one to understand. You walk through an orchard while picking fruit that is easy to reach and offers no obstacles to harvest. You just reach up, pluck some low-hanging fruit, and you effortlessly have some apples or oranges in your hands to enjoy. The problem (that the metaphor subtly points out) is what happens after all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Then you've got to expend a lot more effort to get the rest of it -- with ladders that have to be climbed and whatnot.

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How close are we to a constitutional crisis? Has one already begun? Is it imminent? Or does it merely loom somewhere out on the horizon? Welcome to Week 4 of the Trump administration, folks!

President Donald Trump and his team of henchmen certainly hit the ground running, issuing an absolute flood of executive orders and new policy announcements, which has now led to a resulting flood of lawsuits against them. Federal judges, some of them acting with impressive speed, have already blocked (temporarily, at least -- none of these cases has been fully heard yet) a number of Trump's actions, including the ban on birthright citizenship, a freeze on federal spending, the resignation offer Elon Musk sent to federal workers, dismantling U.S.A.I.D., and the transfer of transgender prisoners. Many of Trump's other actions are still being considered by judges who haven't ruled or issued injunctions yet.

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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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President Donald Trump and his "first buddy" Elon Musk have moved swiftly to precipitate more than one constitutional crisis during the first few weeks of the new administration. The two are running roughshod over the basic separation of powers in American government, aided and abetted by the Republicans in control of Congress. Which leads to a serious question -- how long will it be before they just wash their hands of all pretense of power and formally hand it all directly to Trump?

Sound farfetched? Well, it's happened before. Legislatures have essentially disbanded themselves or made themselves completely irrelevant by handing over -- to one man -- not only the "power of the purse" (the ability to set the government's budget) but also the ability to write all other laws as well. If this comes to pass, it'll be called a "temporary emergency measure," but it will be the death knell of the separation of powers. All that will be left would be for Trump to ignore the Supreme Court, and he will have seized full control of all levers of government. There would simply not be anyone left to stop him, at that point.

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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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Secretary of State Marco Rubio made his first visit abroad this week. He went to Panama and reportedly pushed them to do something about the Panama Canal, in order to somehow appease President Trump's obsession with it. So far, they've refused to do so. Perhaps this is all just as performative as Trump's now-you-see-it-now-you-don't tariffs on Canada and Mexico -- perhaps Trump will find some way to declare victory and move on to other strange obsessions. Panama could, for instance, slightly lower the rates for ships to pass through their canal, either just for American ships or for all ships. That would probably be enough for Trump to move on.

Trump's stance on the Panama Canal is downright delusional. Rubio didn't echo the weirdest of Trump's claims (that Chinese soldiers are actually running the whole operation), he instead tried to somehow square it with the treaty Panama and the U.S. signed which gave them the canal in the first place. Panama is supposed to operate the canal in a totally neutral fashion, and (according to Rubio) they are not, because China operates two of the five ports at either end of the canal. This is, of course, ridiculous (the ports have nothing to do with the operation of the canal itself), but it's better than claiming to see Chinese soldiers where they do not exist, at least.

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Today I read the first of what will likely be a number of Democratic post-election analyses, in an effort to identify what went wrong for the party in 2024 and what should be done to fix it going forward. And I've certainly thought about the subject myself in the past few months, so I thought I'd offer up a rather different take.

The analysis in question does not come from the Democratic Party itself, but from two senior fellows from the Brookings Institution who published their paper on the website of Third Way, which is a so-called "centrist" organization. That's how many describe it, but it's really more of a "corporatist" organization devoted to making sure the Democrats stay in lockstep with big business and Wall Street more than anything else. If Bernie Sanders-style socialism is at one end of an ideological spectrum of Democrats, Third Way would be at the opposite end. Here's one line from their conclusion, in case you have any doubts:

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We begin today with an apology and a solicitation for donations. Our apology is for perhaps not doing as thorough a job of reviewing the past week as we normally do, because last night instead of doing our homework we instead watched the FireAid benefit concert for the victims of the recent Los Angeles fires. If you missed it, at least check out the fireaidla.org site, where you can donate to the cause if you wish. It was quite a show, and well worth watching (note: this review contains only a partial list of the performers...):

FireAid's organizers understood the scale of that balancing act, inviting Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Stevie Nicks, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Earth Wind & Fire, Green Day, Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, John Fogerty, No Doubt, Rod Stewart, Olivia Rodrigo, Sting, Alanis Morissette, Lil Baby, Peso Pluma, John Mayer and others to participate in a sprawling revue divided between two arenas and streamed live on multiple platforms for nearly six hours. It all felt as sweeping as it did familiar, with the show's main surprise pushing the gathering's familiarity threshold toward its limit -- the surviving members of Nirvana gnashing and pummeling through a visceral mini-set, fronted by the likes of St. Vincent, Kim Gordon and Joan Jett.

Sadly, there was yet another tragedy this week to focus on as well, as a commercial airplane crashed into a military helicopter just shy of the runway at National Airport in Washington. And before most of the bodies had even been pulled out of the icy waters of the Potomac River, President Trump offered his words of mourning and tried to pull the country together. For a few seconds, that is. Then he reverted to who he is, in a seriously ugly way:

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