President Donald Trump is unclear on the basic concept of the First Amendment's "free speech" clause. This isn't all that surprising, since he's obviously never made it all the way through a reading of the United States Constitution. After all, the Founding Fathers didn't see fit to provide colorful graphics instead of boring blocks of text, and the whole thing just goes on for pages and pages and pages -- both of which absolutely guarantee Trump has never read it.

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Twitter is at the heart of a storm of controversy today, and rightly so. It just made a timid move to better its own public standing, but it is far too little and far too late to really stem the tide of deserved criticism they're now receiving. Twitter is, to be blunt, scared of President Donald Trump and his legions of followers. So they've allowed him to get away with tweeting pretty much anything that pops into his head, no matter how false or downright destructive his words prove to be. Now, perhaps, they're beginning to pay a price for this timidity in the court of public opinion.

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Proof has finally emerged that President Donald Trump has actually put a mask on his face. Bizarrely, this proof came from a non-official photographer instead of from an official media or White House source. Because the one thing Trump wants to avoid at all costs is ever setting any kind of good example for anyone.

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There's a very big question looming in the backs of many Democrats' minds; one so downright scary that few can even give voice to it. When they do, it comes out almost as a whisper, because the possible consequences are so frightening to contemplate that many feel it is a subject best left unsaid. But that doesn't stop the worrying, because nobody truly knows what Donald Trump will do if he loses the 2020 presidential election.

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Today President Donald Trump returned to a favorite bugaboo of his, the continuation of a relentless smear job on absentee (or "mail-in") voting. This is part and parcel of his world view, which is both contradictory in the extreme as well as laughably hypocritical. Trump's basic position is that he doesn't like it when Democrats use absentee ballots, while it is just fine for Republicans (including, notably, himself) to do so. But the biggest danger for Trump isn't being ridiculed for such blatantly partisan contradictions, but rather that he might in fact motivate more people to vote against him and the Republican Party. Which would, of course, be deliciously ironic for Democrats.

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Former President Barack Obama got up off the bench this weekend and fully entered the fray of the 2020 presidential election. He did so in prominent fashion, since he was given the rather large megaphone of a commencement address to graduating high school seniors that was simultaneously broadcast on every major television network. So this wasn't some tweet or offhanded comment leaked from a phone call (both of which had actually happened the previous week, with less attention paid). What it signals -- hopefully -- is that Obama is becoming fully vested in being the biggest surrogate possible for Joe Biden during the campaign.

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President Donald Trump seems unclear on a few basic scientific and medical concepts. This isn't really news, of course, since Trump seems unclear on a whole host of things each and every day. But this week's comments on coronavirus testing were more than just a little bit astonishing.

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It's been quite a while since we did a "three-dot Thursday" here, but it seemed like the thing to do now that we've got a flood of news coming in that all seems to be variations on a similar theme. The media has woven together all the strands of incompetence from the Trump White House into a cohesive whole, showing how woefully inadequate President Donald Trump has been -- and continues to be -- throughout the coronavirus pandemic. Or, to put it more bluntly, the chickens are coming home to roost...

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New polls just out show that President Donald Trump is badly losing the battle to control the narrative over his response to the coronavirus pandemic. While Trump's public job approval rating is exactly where it has been for pretty much his entire term (43 percent approval), almost all of the state governors are doing much, much better. And the American public overwhelmingly -- by a 3-to-1 margin -- wants to see the economy reopen slower, not faster. All of this has led to Trump petulantly tweeting that he deserves all the credit, instead of the governors. This is pretty pathetic after Trump shoved all responsibility for the pandemic response onto those very same governors. But because he did so, the governors are now reaping all of the praise and thanks from the public, not Trump.

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In recent days, President Donald Trump has been (as he calls it) "cheerleading" the American economy, for three basic reasons. First, to Trump everything is a P.R. problem, at absolute worst. Second, it's all he really knows how to do when it comes to the economy (or anything else, for that matter). And third (and most important to Trump), he knows full well his re-election is going to hinge on whether the voters are going to be feeling any better about the future in November. In particular, Trump has essentially bet all his chips on the third quarter of 2020.

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