Three momentous things happened last week which so overshadowed everything else in the political world that we're just going to ignore everything else up front, here.

First, Donald Trump slouched off to his golf resort in Florida a few hours early, for purely petty reasons -- he wanted the flight to still officially be "Air Force One" (a designation that only exists when the current president of the United States is on the plane), and he also didn't want to have to ask President Joe Biden for the routine favor of one last flight home on the big plane. So he flew while he was still president, after staging a pathetic goodbye rally at Joint Base Andrews (home base of the two planes that serve as Air Force One and Two). He forced the military into giving him one last 21-howitzer salute, and then flew south for the winter. And, hopefully, forever.

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I woke up this morning feeling good. The big reason was that for the first time in a long time I knew I wouldn't discover in the morning news that the president of the United States had done, said, or tweeted something overnight that was embarrassing, cringe-worthy, mean-spirited, or just downright evil. I knew nobody in the federal government would have been fired at 3:00 in the morning via Twitter. I knew no foreign country would be seriously annoyed at America for no reason other than one man-child's insufferable ego.

That's all a really good feeling to wake up to, I have to say, and I look forward to having that same confident feeling every single morning for the next four years. As do tens of millions of others, I'm sure.

President Joe Biden is getting rave reviews for his inaugural speech, which he fully deserves. The speech was nothing more than an extension of the campaign he ran on, a call to heal the soul of America, and a plea for a rise to unity rather than continuing our political "uncivil war." Biden's first job approval polling will, no doubt, reflect this by charting a number higher than Donald Trump managed in his entire four years in office. The American people are pretty obviously ready to see some unity in Washington.

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It is morning in America again.

Ronald Reagan famously made a lot of political hay out of that slogan. The phrase worked so well because Americans generally favor optimism and a bright future over the gloomier alternatives. All modern presidential candidates since Reagan have struck optimistic themes while campaigning. Except one.

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On April 20 of 2017, I remember talking to a friend who was already absolutely exhausted by all of Donald Trump's antics. I remember the date because I responded with: "It's been exactly three months since he took office. That means one-fourth of one year, or only one-sixteenth of his whole term." This was met with groans, even though I was really just trying to caution: "Pace yourself."

We have now almost (as I sit down to write this, there are exactly 18 hours to go) made it through the other 15/16ths of Trump's term. And everybody is now far beyond just being exhausted by it all.

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The mainstream media is finally using the correct terms to describe Donald Trump's efforts to overthrow an American election. The outbreak of insurrection at the U.S. Capitol apparently was enough for them to start calling a lie a lie. And not just a lie, but (as many journalists are now admitting) a Big Lie.

The term is capitalized because it is a historical reference. Adolf Hitler coined the term in Mein Kampf, and Joseph Goebbels perfected its use in Nazi Germany. The idea is a simple one (although this quote attributed to Goebbels may never have actually been said by him): "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Trump's current Big Lie, of course, is that he won the election "in a landslide" and somehow it was stolen away from him by a conspiracy of pretty much everybody. But because Trump's Big Lie led to such a horrific and violent attack on democracy, journalists are now calling it by its rightful name.

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I have to apologize in advance, once again, because I feel that the dire and unprecedented nature of the past week must be directly addressed without the distraction of our other regular Friday Talking Points features. Or, to put it another way, here comes another extended rant, folks.

Next week should be better. Next week should be -- for us all, not just for this column -- a very real and long-awaited return to normalcy. I hope so, at any rate. By this time next week, we will have President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris running the government, and Donald Trump will be fading from the scene in a very big way (after we all endure his final swansong: his second impeachment trial in the Senate). We'll all have breathed a gigantic sigh of relief, and then we can start thinking about handing out awards and writing talking points for Democrats to use once again. But not this week. This week, we have to rant. So here goes.

Throughout his entire presidency, Donald Trump has continued to top himself in the category of "most intense week ever." Over and over again, people thought: "Well, that's it -- he'll never sink lower than this," only to have this turn out to be mere wishful thinking, when the following week turns out to be even worse.

So why was anyone surprised when Trump rolled out his "season finale" (and "series finale," one would like to hope) of his made-for-television presidency in the first week of January? We all knew that whatever the end would look like, it would be spectacular (or, perhaps, "spectacularly bad"). And here we are.

The House of Representatives has only ever impeached a president four times in all our history. And the most disgraceful president (in my lifetime, at least) wasn't even one of them, because Richard Nixon quit before the House could approve the articles of impeachment they had drawn up against him. I should qualify that, because Nixon will now be known as "the most disgraceful president until Trump came along." And as many have been pointing out, Watergate was bad, but at least it had no body count.

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No House Republican has actually gone on record saying he or she voted against the impeachment of the president because of fear for themselves or their family, but that is indeed what is being reported by other House members they've shared such fears with. If true, this is a stunning indictment of their own moral failing. Because it means that the terrorists have successfully extorted votes in Congress with the threat of personal violence or death. Think about that concept for just one moment, because it is stunning. By refusing to vote a certain way out of fear, the terrorists have won. No, they didn't win the larger vote, but if even one vote switched out because of such rank intimidation, then something is very wrong indeed.

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That headline is meant to evoke an earlier phrase from American history which (even before a book and subsequent movie popularized the term) denoted one of the most existentially-dangerous times in not just our country's history, but in that of the entire world: the "thirteen days in October" of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy was informed that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear-tipped missiles a mere 80 miles from the United States, and he began a series of moves which could very well have ended up as the start of World War III. This is not an overstatement or exaggeration. If open hostilities had broken out during the height of the Cold War, it is almost certain (especially seeing what caused the crisis in the first place) that there would have been an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. For 13 days, from October 16 to 28, 1962, the world teetered on the edge of all-out nuclear war. Thankfully, sanity prevailed, and both sides agreed to face-saving measures which ended with the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy gambled, he gambled big, and he won.

The year 2021 is still young -- only 13 days long, in fact. Yet we're only halfway through what historians might later call the "fourteen days in January." The period between January 6, 2021 and the inauguration of Joe Biden at noon on January 20 will forever be seared into the memory of every American now alive as witness to another existential crisis. This time, though, the enemy is not from without, but from within. It comes not in the form of a nuclear attack, but rather in the form of a direct attack on American democracy itself.

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Younger readers may be surprised to hear it, but the Republican Party used to stand foursquare for law and order. Indeed, it was a big part of their whole political brand. Republicans used to actually sanctimoniously lecture the rest of us on the righteousness of taking personal responsibility for our actions, and how there simply had to be severe consequences for bad actions. Society absolutely depended on it, they told us.

That was then. This is now.

Now, the Trumpian Republican Party is standing solidly against law and order. The president of the United States attacked the Constitution itself, by whipping up a dangerous mob to forcibly prevent the United States Congress from concluding a free and fair election (that Trump lost). That is anti-law and anti-order, defined. And now, all those who aided and abetted this attempt to overthrow the will of the voters are taking zero personal responsibility for both their actions and their inaction, and they are trying to convince the rest of us that there needn't be any consequences for any of it, "because it would divide the country." Not a peep about how a blatant attempt to overthrow a free and fair election "divided" the country, mind you.

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Republicans have always been much better at the spin game than Democrats. That's a generally-accepted fact. Which is why it is so important right now for everyone to reject, repudiate, and heap withering scorn upon the latest GOP talking point about last Wednesday's seditious insurrection at the United States Capitol, which tried to forcibly overthrow the will of the people as expressed in a presidential election.

"Impeachment," these shameless hypocrites warn us, "would just lead to further division in the country." Seriously -- they've got the unmitigated gall to preach some sort of Utopian "unity," after a direct and violent attack on American democracy which was led and egged on by a sitting U.S. president. The sheer chutzpah of this naked attempt at gaslighting is just staggering. The very idea is downright obscene, in fact.

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