Today, former Vice President Kamala Harris ended all the speculation about her mounting a campaign to become California's next governor. By doing so, she amped up a bunch of speculation about her mounting a campaign to become president in 2028. As a Californian, I have to say I am relieved that Harris won't be running for governor next year, and I am also profoundly unexcited about the prospect of Harris running for president.

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The next few weeks could be fairly pivotal for the U.S. economy, with new monthly economic numbers being released telling us where we are now, while perhaps new tariff numbers will be imposed by the end of the week which may tell us where we are headed with the rest of the world. All of these outcomes hinge mostly on how Donald Trump's big trade war with the rest of the planet continues to play out.

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A half-century ago, a piece of conventional political wisdom was born. President Richard Nixon was eventually forced to resign his presidency due to the Watergate scandal -- the first time this had ever happened in America -- and the phrase: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" was born. The quote is not ascribed to any individual, it just became a commonplace way of talking about the scandal that engulfed Nixon and his administration. Today, in a sort of meta way, the White House is once again engulfed in a scandal, except this time it is once-more-removed. It's not the crime or the cover-up, it has now become "the cover-up of the cover-up" that bedevils Donald Trump.

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We have to begin today with an absurdity. It's been that kind of week....

This week, Donald Trump proved once again -- beyond the shadow of a doubt -- that his understanding of basic mathematics would be considered sub-par in any random fifth-grade math class in this country. Most 10-year-olds could spot Trump's glaring error, to put that another way.

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Back in the before-times... back when politics was fairly normal... we all had a special name for the time of year when Congress gives itself a 5- or 6-week vacation and political stories are thin on the ground. It was called the "Silly Season." It earned this moniker because in the dearth of actual political news being made, the mainstream media political types would zero in on some story that was (for one reason or another) just completely ridiculous. Mountains were made out of molehills. Idiotic stories would get blown out of proportion and enormous amounts of ink and airtime were devoted to dissecting whatever silly story everyone was obsessing about. A good time would be had by all, until Congress finally returned in September and started generating some actual political news once again.

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Lo and behold, Democrats have finally found a good political narrative, heading into their big summer break. For once, they have woven a few disparate political issues into one poignant, easy-to-understand storyline. And for once, they are (so far, at least) all singing in unison from the same songbook.

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Congress is eagerly getting ready to take an enormous chunk of time off once again. The Republican House of Representatives even pushed their final day in session up by one day, to get a jump on their extended "August break." But to be fair, they didn't do this because they were over-eager to go on vacation, instead they did it out of political necessity, since they had earlier announced that there wouldn't be any more floor votes until after the break. And they did this because they are terrified of the entire Epstein files issue. So my question at this point is what are their own voters going to say to them when they do go back to their home districts? Are we going to see lots of videos of town halls where their constituents rake them over the coals for not forcing the public release of the full Epstein files, or will it be more of a non-issue?

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Why is Russia so special to Donald Trump? Why does Trump always give Vladimir Putin a free pass? Those are questions that have long been asked (for various reasons), ever since Trump entered politics. But no matter what the actual answer is (many have speculated, but nobody truly knows, other than Trump himself), the fact that Trump treats Vladimir Putin's Russia with kid gloves is an incontrovertible fact.

The most recent glaring example of this is how Russia has (up to this point) been declared exempt from Trump's global trade war. Trump has been all over the map with his tariff threats, but one part of it has remained consistent: a 10 percent tariff on all countries, no matter what. This initially included every country Team Trump could find on a map -- including one solely populated by penguins -- but not Russia.

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Once again, this week was consumed by an out-of-control political fire that is engulfing Donald Trump, his attorney general, the F.B.I., and all of Trump's fellow Republicans in Congress. They built a political Ponzi scheme out of the Epstein files, and it has now completely collapsed around them.

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I should start out by clarifying that headline. When I say "Trump Is Getting Weaker," I am not referring to the news today that Donald Trump is suffering from problems with the veins in his legs and the bruising on his hands. I speak not of physical weakness, but instead of political weakness. And I'm going to mostly set aside the continuing internecine battle among Republicans over the Jeffrey Epstein files as well, since although the issue has been making headlines for weeks now, there is something much more interesting going on in the background. While Trump flails around desperately trying to somehow pin all the blame over the Epstein files cover-up on Democrats (which isn't convincing anyone), the widening schism within his own party has happened independently from some much larger trends. Democrats are gleefully trolling Trump and the Republicans over the Epstein files fiasco, but no matter what the upshot of it all turns out to be, the fact will remain that Trump is getting a whole lot weaker on pretty much every other issue under the sun. Sooner or later, Democrats should start making some political hay out of this weakness (assumably, after the Epstein files tempest blows over).

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