Welcome back to our annual year-end awards column!

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Normally we open our annual awards column with an explanation of why John McLaughlin shouldn't sue us. It's become traditional, in fact, to skate the thin ice of "homage" and "satire" versus straight-up theft of intellectual property (which, of course, we'd never ever do... or, at least, admit).

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Donald Trump is never going to stop being Donald Trump. I think that much should be obvious to all by now. What this means for his term in office is really anyone's guess at the moment, but what concerns me the most is how he may just continue to redefine reality to suit his own ego's needs. This is currently on display in the calls for investigating Russia's hacking during the election. Team Trump seems content to define their own reality, which might be stated: "It's just another sore-loser complaint from Democrats and the mainstream media -- they can't accept the fact that Trump won, so they're making stuff up about Russia interfering in the election to feel better, that's all." Trump rejects the consensus of what is now the entire intelligence-gathering apparatus of the federal government, because he doesn't like what they're reporting to him.

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We've got a lot to cover today (including Obama's final press conference), so let's just dive right in and try to get through the rest of the week's news in lightning fashion.

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I wrote a few weeks ago about the dilemma Mitt Romney would face if Donald Trump offered him the secretary of State position. That dilemma did not actually happen, and it now seems like Trump was just yanking Mitt's chain for the fun of it. How presidential! One of Trump's close advisors just admitted as much, saying Trump really just wanted Romney to publicly apologize for all the mean and nasty things he said about Trump during the election. Romney reportedly refused to do so, which was probably smart because it seems to have been the whole point of the exercise. Trump probably wasn't ever going to appoint Romney anyway, but wanted to see how low Mitt would grovel if he thought he could get the job.

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Will Donald Trump be the second-best "bully" president we've had? I realize that that question can be read two ways, but I'm using "bully" in the older political sense of the word rather than in the "already ripped into 289 people on Twitter" sense. So while a strong case could be made for Trump-as-bully, what I'm referring to instead is the Teddy Roosevelt "Bully for you!" sense of the word. And, more importantly, the "bully pulpit." Because, much as Democrats might hate to admit it, Trump may be the most adroit user of the bully pulpit to change American politics in a very long time.

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OK, that's a rather unusual title, but you'll have to wait until the talking points part of the program for us to address it. Call it "the lesson to be learned from the Carrier jobs and Donald Trump," or the silver lining that just might be an effective tool for Democrats in the near future. First, though, we've got to get through the news of the week and handing out our weekly awards.

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Donald Trump's impending presidency is cause for a lot of concern among many, including both his political opponents and members of his own party. This can all be boiled down to the basic question of what, exactly, Trump is going to do as president. At this point, it's almost impossible to know whether he'll try to follow through on even the strongest of his campaign promises, or whether he'll decide to chart a completely different course once in office. That's what is worrying so many -- people both against Trump and for Trump alike.

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This article was written in response to a Huffington Post article by Max Weiss, which was in turn written as a response to a Slate article. The original Slate article was titled: "So We're Still Blaming Jill Stein And James Comey, Huh?" and the Weiss response was titled: "Things I Blame For Hillary Clinton's Loss, Ranked." But the Weiss list was so far removed from my own feelings about the Clinton loss that I felt it was time to respond with my own blame list. It's been a month since the election, so hopefully enough time has passed that Democrats can discuss what went so wrong. So here is my own list of the things I blame for the 2016 election loss, ranked. And I have to quote Weiss in saying (while he was blaming Bernie Sanders): "I know this is going to piss a lot of people off, but so be it."

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We're approaching the end of the year, so we can all expect to hear lots of "the year that was" items in the news. One of the earliest entries in this news genre came from across the pond:

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