Donald Trump thinks he has a plan. First, get rid of enough members of the Federal Reserve Board and replace them with his own minions, and then they'll do his bidding and drastically lower interest rates. Once he's appointed a majority of them, they'll do precisely what he wants without question. In the meantime, his appointee to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be firing high-level bean-counters and replacing them with apparatchiks, so that they can then make the official inflation number anything Trump wants it to be. This way, even if real inflation goes through the roof (as a result of lowering interest rates too fast), nobody will know about it because inflation will "officially" be at some ridiculously-unbelievable low figure. The economy "booms" (as measured by Trump's numbers), interest rates go down, and everyone's happy!

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Current and former employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency just sounded the alarm over their agency's ability to continue their mission. In an extraordinary letter they warn of another impending disaster on the scale of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In fact, the title of their open letter is: "Katrina Declaration And Petition To Congress." In it, they warn that another man-made disaster on the same scale could easily happen soon, as a direct result of the changes the administration of Donald Trump has been making to their agency.

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After Donald Trump held two back-to-back summits, in an effort to get a quick ceasefire and peace agreement in Ukraine, not much of anything has actually changed. Unless you count the rest of the world either laughing at America's president or gingerly trying to not bruise his all-too-fragile ego. Both of those things have increased, sadly.

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Donald Trump has ushered in a period of political shamelessness. Things that politicians used to do very quietly or in secret are now done right out in the open. There is no longer any pretense about such moves, the politicians now brag about what they're doing. This is evident in too many ways to even list, but the most prominent example right now is the mid-decade redistricting battles being waged in the states. Led by Texas and California, this could soon spread to other states as well, as Republicans jockey to avoid losing control of the House of Representatives next year and Democrats move to counterbalance these efforts.

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The prospects of a ceasefire happening soon in Ukraine were always pretty slim. Now they seem to be receding into oblivion. Without some strong and decisive action by Donald Trump, the situation in Ukraine does not look likely to change in any meaningful way any time soon. The war will continue, people will keep dying, and Vladimir Putin will feel no compunction to bring an end to any of it. That seems to be the emerging reality.

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If they want to win the midterms next year, Democrats should really return in a big way to that old chestnut from the Bill Clinton era: "It's the economy, stupid." Because that is where both Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are the weakest, and the economy is almost always either at or very near the top of the list of issues voters care the most about.

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While campaigning, Donald Trump promised the world he would end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office. Sometimes he even one-upped himself, suggesting he could probably end the war before he was even sworn in.

That, of course, didn't happen. Here we are more than 200 days in to Trump's second term, and the war rages on.

Donald Trump likes to see himself as a strongman -- a real "tough guy." But what we've seen is that he is at heart no more than a bully who immediately backs down when confronted with a truly strong opponent. Vladimir Putin is fully aware of this fact. Which all sets the stage for their summit meeting this Friday in Alaska.

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Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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There's a slogan used by those who support redistricting reform that is worth starting with today: "Voters should pick their politicians; the politicians shouldn't be able to pick their voters." But the process of designing districts -- for U.S. House of Representatives seats as well as state legislative seats -- has long been a political process. The word "gerrymandering" was coined to describe a Massachusetts governor (Elbridge Gerry) who, while serving in office in 1812, approved a district so convoluted that a newspaper drew it as a mythical lizard with the name "the gerrymander." The name stuck, which shows you this sort of thing has been going on for over two centuries now.

Usually these battles are fought immediately after the decennial Census, as states have to adjust to a new number of House members (whether fewer or more). But it's not illegal for a state to redistrict mid-decade, which has been happening more and more frequently over the past couple of decades.

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Today's job numbers are bad. There's no getting around it. So Donald Trump reacted to this bad news by immediately firing the messenger. Which is really bad. "Banana republic" bad, in fact. We should all expect Trump to name the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who will then dutifully report next month that "in August, America added eight million new jobs, thanks to our Dear Leader's brilliance." Because that is obviously what Trump wants to hear, instead of any proof that the fantasy world he inhabits in his head is rosier than the actual reality in which the rest of us live.

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