This is going to be a much shorter column than I had expected to write. Because last night, Donald Trump appeared on television to America and said basically nothing. He spoke for 20 minutes and didn't manage to say anything new or informative at all during the entire time. He essentially just read off a series of social media posts he's already made previously. But there was just no substance to any of it.

All the questions, worries, fears, and concerns that Americans had before Trump spoke still exist. None have been answered or assuaged or explained at all. So while I had intended to spend time analyzing Trump's speech today, there's just no "there there" to analyze. It was a giant nothingburger of a speech.

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Maybe we need a new word for the way Donald Trump seems to be running the country: "chaocracy." Rule by chaos. The "Madman Theory" writ large. Nobody has any clue what's going to happen next, from Trump himself all the way down to average Americans and the rest of the world.

Of course, this has always been Donald Trump's modus operandi to some extent, but it is much more apparent now that we're in what seems to be a prolonged war. Trump is now attempting a feint in this war, but nobody's really sure what is the feint and what will become reality in the next few weeks. Trump himself probably doesn't know, at this point.

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America is at war again. This time, just like the last time (Venezuela), the war has seemingly been launched completely on a whim from the Oval Office. Little or no effort was made by Donald Trump (or anyone in his administration) to explain to the American public the reasons for launching a war right now, the objectives of this war, or any expectations whatsoever about how it will be fought, how long it will be fought, and what is supposed to come afterwards. Perhaps Trump has just completely given up on his fervent wish for a Nobel Peace Prize? It's hard to figure -- just like pretty much everything about this war.

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Perhaps it was because the week ends on Friday the 13th, but whatever the real reason was, Donald Trump didn't have a great week this week. Which, of course, is good news for everyone else! There was actually a lot of good news in the political world this week -- so much that we're not even going to bother with the other news that wasn't so good.

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The freedom of speech in America just got two big confirmations from the judicial system, which is good news for everyone who cherishes their constitutional rights. Both of these were related, since they both stemmed from the same cause: the video that six members of Congress (all of whom had previously served either in the military or for the nation's intelligence services) released last year informing serving military members that it was their right and their duty to refuse to follow illegal orders. This is the indeed the law (in the Uniform Code of Military Justice), and all the members of Congress did was to reiterate what the law says.

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Today marks the end of the first year of Donald Trump's second term in office. One down, three to go.

Looking back, the most notable thing about Trump's first year back was how he has thrown himself fully into the Silicon Valley maxim to "move fast and break things." Trump has indeed moved fast, and he has indeed broken many things -- some of which will take a very long time to put back together and some of which may just stay broken forever.

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Donald Trump is approaching his own Rubicon, it seems. The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. "Burning your bridges" is a slightly-different metaphor with a similar meaning. For Trump, the Rubicon he is contemplating crossing is invoking the Insurrection Act to send in U.S. armed forces to an American city.

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It has been a week of stunning events and dangerous rhetorical excesses. Currently the political debate is divided over the question of when government officials can use deadly force against people who are protesting or ignoring orders from those officials. This question is steeped in politics, as it so often is. Whether a person deserves death at the hands of the state almost always has a political element to it, which is not exactly a new thing.

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Congress is actually showing some signs of standing up for itself. This is remarkable, since for the past year they have been no more than a rubber stamp, approving anything Donald Trump wants while ignoring anything he does to encroach on their constitutional powers. Today, however, several votes were held which did indeed push back on Trump in notable ways. All of them will likely wind up being merely symbolic, but it is still refreshing to see at least some signs of life from Congress.

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Donald Trump is not being subtle about why he decided to launch a military attack against Venezuela and spirit away their country's leader, Nicolás Maduro. Instead of Trump's previous attempts to cloak his naked power grab with some sort of justification, he now just flat-out admits "it's about the oil." Venezuela has a lot of oil in the ground -- more than any other country on the planet, in fact. Trump wants it for the U.S. So he's going to force them to allow American companies to go in and take it, one way or another.

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