We'd like to begin today by apologizing for not including whatever scandal broke while we were writing this column. It takes us hours to write these, and while we're typing we're not reading news headlines. So this weekly wrapup will doubtlessly not mention whatever scandal broke in the past few hours, and for this we apologize. We would direct you to the final talking point today to cover this lapse (from which we also borrowed our subtitle today, because Daniel Drezner's article is such a hilarious piece of satire).

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This week will go down in American political history as the week people stopped comparing Donald Trump to Andrew Jackson, and instead began comparing Trump to a different Oval Office predecessor, Richard Nixon. If we had a dollar for every time the word "Nixonian" was written or uttered onscreen this week, we could retire tomorrow.

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There must be something to the myths, though, even if only in a Jungian-archetypical kind of way. Because they certainly still remain with us. In today's world, of course, they are not dressed in motley (well, some less so than others...); and instead of a perch near the throne, they crack wise on television shows to an audience of millions. They are our late-night comedians. Two of them were in the news earlier this week, but before I get to Monday night's performances by Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers, I'd like to confess my own evolution in favor of our modern court jesters.

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Today, arguments were heard by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals over President Donald Trump's revised travel ban on a handful of Muslim countries. Next week, the Ninth Circuit will chime in as well. But we're fast approaching the point where the entire argument becomes irrelevant, to both sides.

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I haven't done one of these three-dot columns in a while (as always, in homage to the late, great columnist Herb Caen), but the flood of news tidbits flowing from the White House is relentless, so I thought it was time to catch up on some of the fresh idiocy coming from the Oval Office.

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Barack Obama caused somewhat of a tizzy last week, when it was announced he would be giving a speech to some bastions of Wall Street, for a cool $400,000 speaking fee. Some were simply aghast at the idea, for a couple of different reasons. But there's one way Obama could make most of the criticism disappear (at least that portion coming from the left), and that is by making one simple promise. If Obama pledged to immediately release the transcript of his speech right after he gave it, he could defuse a lot of the angst the idea is causing among progressives. The speech reportedly won't be given until September, so Obama isn't facing an immediate deadline; but the faster he swears he'll release the text of his speech, the better for him politically.

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Tomorrow, in case you hadn't heard, will be Donald Trump's 100th day as president. Grading his performance has been a weeklong event in the media. Rather than our normal Friday format, what follows is our honest evaluation of Trump's first 100 days, which might be summed up as: "Coulda been better, coulda been a lot worse."

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Decades ago, a group of American Nazis wanted to hold a march, complete with swastikas and all the rest of the Nazi regalia. The city they wanted to march in turned their request down. The Nazis fought in court, and they were aided in doing so by the American Civil Liberties Union. That's what an unshakable commitment to the First Amendment means -- defending those with whom you do not agree. Which is why I support Ann Coulter's right to speak at the University of California, Berkeley. I certainly don't agree with a single word that comes out of the woman's mouth, but I have to defend her right to spew her bile in a venue supported by my tax dollars.

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Democrats are at a similar point now to where Republicans found themselves four years ago, but so far there has been no Democratic post-mortem. The GOP document appeared in March of 2013, but we're almost into May and no such Democratic self-examination has taken place. Partly this is because the Democratic National Committee changed hands in the meantime, but Tom Perez has been on the job for a few months now, so perhaps it's time to attempt an analysis of how the party needs to improve?

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At the end of the week, Donald Trump has two big deadlines looming -- one real, and one imaginary. The real one is that the government will shut down unless Congress acts, and the imaginary one is the end of Trump's first 100 days as president. Not content with the fact that solving the budget problem is going to be hard enough, Trump is pushing for action on two other fronts as well: tax reform and healthcare reform. He wants a big win to brag about when he reaches 100 days, but he might just be setting himself up for failure across the board.

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