It's hard, as each new week goes by, not to get distracted by all of the chaos emanating from Washington. This week, we're going to begin by connecting a few dots that really need connecting, and (so far) haven't gotten enough attention (in our humble opinion).

Before Donald Trump became president again, both he and his MAGA choir spent a lot of time decrying "censorship" and wailing about their "free speech" being somehow suppressed. This was largely due to social media sites policing their allowable content, and occasionally removing objectionable or flat-out false posts and even kicking people off their platforms.

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As metaphors go, "low-hanging fruit" is a pretty easy one to understand. You walk through an orchard while picking fruit that is easy to reach and offers no obstacles to harvest. You just reach up, pluck some low-hanging fruit, and you effortlessly have some apples or oranges in your hands to enjoy. The problem (that the metaphor subtly points out) is what happens after all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. Then you've got to expend a lot more effort to get the rest of it -- with ladders that have to be climbed and whatnot.

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How close are we to a constitutional crisis? Has one already begun? Is it imminent? Or does it merely loom somewhere out on the horizon? Welcome to Week 4 of the Trump administration, folks!

President Donald Trump and his team of henchmen certainly hit the ground running, issuing an absolute flood of executive orders and new policy announcements, which has now led to a resulting flood of lawsuits against them. Federal judges, some of them acting with impressive speed, have already blocked (temporarily, at least -- none of these cases has been fully heard yet) a number of Trump's actions, including the ban on birthright citizenship, a freeze on federal spending, the resignation offer Elon Musk sent to federal workers, dismantling U.S.A.I.D., and the transfer of transgender prisoners. Many of Trump's other actions are still being considered by judges who haven't ruled or issued injunctions yet.

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We aren't even three weeks in to the administration of President Elon Musk, and already he has instituted an ideological purge the likes of which America has not seen since the time of Senator Joe McCarthy. Except this time they're not rooting out communists (or suspected communists, or communist sympathizers) but instead just "people they don't like." Or maybe "people who have pissed off Elon" -- that's probably closer to the reality of it.

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We begin today with an apology and a solicitation for donations. Our apology is for perhaps not doing as thorough a job of reviewing the past week as we normally do, because last night instead of doing our homework we instead watched the FireAid benefit concert for the victims of the recent Los Angeles fires. If you missed it, at least check out the fireaidla.org site, where you can donate to the cause if you wish. It was quite a show, and well worth watching (note: this review contains only a partial list of the performers...):

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President Donald Trump is fast making a warning many Democrats made before his election come true: that he would prove to be an utterly lawless president. Trump's disdain for not only federal law but the entire federal judiciary is becoming more and more apparent, and he's barely begun his second week back in office. He hasn't taken the final step in creating a completely unfettered and lawless executive branch, but at this point it seems only a matter of time before he does so.

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In just about every presidential election, the political punditry tries to frame what happened in it in the easiest possible way, sometimes pinning a win or loss on a certain demographic slice of the electorate (remember "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads"?) and sometimes putting the focus on a single oversimplified issue. One of the big themes in this regard for the last election was the price of eggs. True to form, they even slapped a cutesy label on it: voters were angry about "eggflation."

Which is why we sincerely hope that Donald Trump is asked about it as often as possible -- say, once a week, at a minimum -- now that he is president again. Because for all his promises, eggflation is going to be a very tough problem for him to solve.

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Well, that didn't take long. Hours after swearing an oath to uphold and defend the United States Constitution, President Donald Trump issued an executive order which attempted to rewrite one part of that same Constitution. He did so unilaterally, without any action by Congress. Of course, neither Congress nor a U.S. president is actually capable of changing the Constitution's text on their own -- that would require a constitutional amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states' legislatures. But that pesky detail didn't stop Trump from trying.

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And so we come to the final Friday Talking Points of President Joe Biden's term in office.

It is perhaps appropriate that the funeral of Jimmy Carter happened in the midst of Biden winding down his final weeks. Because Joe Biden -- another one-term Democratic president like Jimmy -- will likely become more appreciated as time goes by, just as Carter was.

Joe Biden had a pretty spectacular first two years in office, in terms of getting legislation passed. Granted, he had a Democratic Congress to work with and the continuing crisis of a pandemic to spur the politicians to actually act. He used both to get a sweeping agenda passed which will have an impact for years to come. But he had to grapple with two corporate-friendly Democrats in the Senate who held him back from achieving an even-more-historic agenda. If the full "Build Back Better" plan had made it past Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, then Americans would doubtlessly feel a lot differently (and better) about government's role in their economic lives.

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Maybe it's time to bring back the concept of adversaries settling their insults with a good old-fashioned duel? That's the thought I have been having while watching the flurry of playground tantrums and unrestrained bullying spewing forth from the highest ranks of MAGA supporters. Maybe Steve Bannon and Elon Musk should just count off ten paces and take potshots at each other -- they could even make it pay-per-view and make a fortune! Well... whomever was left alive might, at any rate.

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