Since today is Labor Day, I thought it was time to point out something that seems incredibly obvious to me. If you listen to the inside-the-Beltway chatter, Democrats are currently seen as floundering around, searching for an agenda. This is less true than the cocktail-party-circuit crowd believes, but whatever. Simultaneously, Democrats are urged to try to win back the working-class vote, because Donald Trump supposedly seduced them all away with his empty promises. Again, the answer to this perceived problem is pretty obvious. The Democratic Party needs to rededicate itself to the Labor agenda -- thus giving it a solid agenda to fight for, and also a perfect way to woo back white working-class voters.

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Donald Trump began last week (as we measure time here, from Friday deadline to Friday deadline) by pardoning a racist sheriff who had been convicted (but not even sentenced yet) of ignoring the Constitution and defying the federal courts. Trump announced this just as Hurricane Harvey hit Texas, in the hopes that nobody but his base would notice. He also sent formal instructions to the Pentagon to begin turning away transgendered Americans who want to serve their country, also in the hopes that few would notice. In the midst of all this "news dump" frenzy, Steve Bannon's acolyte Sebastian Gorka was unceremoniously shown the door at the White House. That all happened late in the day last Friday, so for us it was a fairly jaw-dropping start to the week.

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Senator Kamala Harris is in the news today because she just announced at a town hall that she will be co-sponsoring the single-payer healthcare bill that Senator Bernie Sanders will soon unveil. Harris has previously been lukewarm towards single-payer (according to her critics on the left), so this was seen as a big political step for her to have taken. Read another way, though, it seemed more that Harris is moving with an abundance of caution rather than being in any way against the concept of single-payer healthcare.

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President Donald Trump gave a speech today in Missouri, on the subject of tax reform. True to form, it was light on details and contained almost no actual numbers. The entire speech was designed to repackage "trickle-down economics" one more time, and sell it as "populism" to the people who voted for Trump. It remains to be seen how effective this will be, but at least Trump is making the attempt to sell one of his agenda items directly to the populace -- something that was noticeably absent in the fight over repealing and replacing Obamacare. Maybe this time will be different, Team Trump seems to be calculating. Maybe Trump'll be able to sell the tired old GOP idea of: "Let's give your boss a big huge tax cut, and then maybe some shred of it will eventually trickle down to you" to his voters. Republicans seem to have an endless capacity for believing this (and an equally infinite capacity to ignore all the other times when it didn't work out as well for the middle class as promised), so perhaps Trump can get his voters excited about slashing corporate tax rates this time around, too.

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Next month will be a busy one in Congress, with several crucial pieces of legislation (with looming deadlines) due. So, of course, President Donald Trump chose this particular moment to pick a meaningless fight with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After all, what better time to antagonize the second-most powerful Republican in Washington?

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Maybe we all just misheard him. Maybe it was his outer-borough accent. Maybe what candidate Donald Trump really said was:

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Welcome back to Friday Talking Points! Let's see... anything big happen in the two weeks while we were away?

We're kidding, of course. The flood of sewage from Donald Trump's mouth was so pervasive, it was downright impossible to ignore it from anywhere on the planet. So last week we watched in fear as Trump got in a shoving match with Kim Jong Un, and this week we remained agape while Trump told us what he really feels about people who march with swastikas while screaming about Jews -- that they're "very fine people."

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As time goes by, more and more elephants in Washington seem to be going rogue. By this, we mean that resistance to Donald Trump is growing... within the Republican Party. Just last week, three GOP senators (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain) denied Trump his sought-after "repeal and replace Obamacare" bill. Senator David Perdue from Georgia summed it up as: "We had three chairmen who went rogue on the Republican caucus and cost us this vote." Since then, other elephants have been going rogue at an increasing rate.

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President Donald Trump finally got a major piece of legislation to sign. However, he wasn't too thrilled about it and I doubt he'll be bragging much about it in the future. Because while it could be called a rather stunning bipartisan congressional victory, it certainly wasn't any sort of political victory for Trump. Unless you count "unifying Congress... against Trump," which I kind of doubt he would.

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For the first six months of his presidency, Donald Trump has always been able to count on a "floor" of public support of around 40 percent. Through thick and thin, four-in-ten Americans approved of the job he was doing. That seems to now be changing. For the first time, his own base is starting to become disillusioned with Trump. So far the change is slight, but the trendline doesn't look good for the near future for the president.

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