Today is the first day of the impeachment trial, some of which I watched earlier. However, nothing of any real note will happen today as the whole debate currently is over the rules the Senate will agree to for the trial itself -- and Mitch McConnell seems to have the GOP votes locked down to push through his own version of the rules. Notably, these will not be as stringent as he initially proposed, but that victory apparently came from pushback from within his own party, not from Democrats. In any case, we'll have plenty of time in the coming days to discuss the trial, so today instead I decided to take a look at what Iowa and New Hampshire will mean for the leading Democratic presidential candidates instead.

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This doublethink continued this week, as every sitting senator (except the one who was absent due to a family medical emergency) swore a solemn oath to be an impartial juror -- an oath that several Republicans have already publicly promised to utterly disregard. Because, you know, all that business about being for law and order and all that tut-tutting over the sins of "moral relativism" is so 1990s.

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While reading everyone else's take on last night's debate, I came across an interesting idea. Actually, two of them, but they're closely related, both being suggestions for how the debate format might be changed from what we saw last night to improve it for everyone. The first suggestion was an incremental one: since there are now fewer candidates, give each of them longer answer segments -- anywhere from two to five minutes. That makes a lot of sense now that there are only six of them on stage. But the reaction that really spurred my thinking came from Larry Sabato, who wrote in Politico the following suggestion:

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To use a sports metaphor, we're right at the end of the pre-season and about to start the actual games that count. Tonight was the last presidential debate between the Democratic candidates before Iowa votes in its caucuses. From now on, in each subsequent debate, we'll know not just who is up in the public opinion polling, but who has done better at the actual polls, where voters cast their ballots for the Democratic nomination.

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We've said it before and we're sure we'll have to say it again before the year's out, but President Trump is the personification of what Richard Nixon used to call the "Madman Theory" of foreign policy. Back then, it was a bluff -- if Nixon acted crazy enough, then perhaps the North Vietnamese would think he was so crazy he might just drop a nuclear bomb on them. This would tend to restrain them more than if they were sure he wouldn't.

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The next Democratic presidential debate is going to almost have to focus intensely on questions of foreign policy. No matter what anyone had planned previously, the situation almost demands it now. So far, the debates have been remarkably light on foreign policy, which has allowed almost all the candidates to utter platitudes about the type of world they'd like to see as president, without delving too far into any specifics about what they'd do as president at all (except perhaps on minor differences between the candidates' policies). This is no longer good enough, as we all wait to see what happens next with Iran.

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At the start of the Democratic presidential primary season, some pundits latched onto what they considered a fun way to label how the race was shaping up -- the "killer Bs." You had [Joe] Biden, Beto [O'Rourke], [Cory] Booker, Bernie [Sanders], [Michael] Bennet, [Steve] Bullock, and even [Pete] Buttigieg. That's a lot of Bs, to be sure (a whole hive, maybe?), and it's not even the full list. It was also (as you can tell) a fairly silly way to frame the race, but whatever. The funny thing is, with less than a month to go before the first votes are cast, we've still got a swarm of Bs. Four of the top five candidates still qualify: Biden, Bernie, Buttigieg, and newcomer [Michael] Bloomberg. The only odd woman out is Elizabeth Warren, although it wouldn't surprise me if some pundits started trying to call her "Beth," just to fit her into this strained metaphor.

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As we sit down to write this, America is on the brink... of a lot of things, all at once. Largest among these: we are now on the brink of another war in the Middle East, this time with Iran. We could also be on the brink of a North Korean nuclear test or I.C.B.M. launch, which would probably signal a disastrous end to the Trump diplomatic bromance with Kim Jong Un. We're on the brink of a presidential impeachment trial in the Senate -- only the third one in our entire history. We're on the brink of a presidential primary season. And we're on the brink of a new political decade. All are pretty momentous, meaning that 2020 could turn out to be even more chaotic than the three years which preceded it. There's a scary (or just plain exhausting) thought, indeed.

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Is Nancy Pelosi now just openly trolling Trump? It certainly seems that way. At this point, Pelosi's refusal to send over the articles of impeachment to the Senate appears to be nothing short of a political stunt to keep the impeachment story raging over the holiday weeks at the end of the year, while causing Trump's head to explode (even more than normal, of course). By this measure, it is working out wonderfully well for Pelosi.

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Welcome back to the second and final installment of our year-end awards columns! If you missed last week's column, you should probably check that out, too.

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