This week, porn star Stormy Daniels sued the president, to nullify the hush agreement between them which resulted in her getting paid $130,000 hush money mere weeks before the 2016 election.

We will now take a pause for everyone to consider exactly what would be happening right now in Washington if this story was exactly the same except for the name "President Barack Obama." Just imagine what the response would have been from congressional Republicans! Especially if the porn star were white.

Of course, since Trump nominally has an "R" after his name, the silence emanating from Republicans was deafening. Nothin' to see here, folks, move along...

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When you sit back and think about it, that is a rather extraordinary headline. Or, at the very least, it should be. These days, though, not so much. In fact, the story of Donald Trump allegedly paying $130,000 hush money -- to a porn star weeks before the election so she would keep quiet about their alleged affair, which took place either while Trump's third wife was pregnant or just after the birth of the baby (or both) -- was largely ignored for the past few months, due to so many other chaotic crises taking place simultaneously within the White House. It will be hard for future historians to grasp, but the story of hush money paid off to a porn star actually struggled to gain traction in the national news. And that is even more extraordinary than the story itself. But then that's life in the Trump era, folks.

The facts as we know them, at this point in time: Trump's lawyer paid off Stormy Daniels (as she is known in the adult film industry) to the tune of $130,000, mere days before America voted Trump in as president. Could such bombshell news have swayed anyone's vote, if it had been widely known right before the election? Maybe, maybe not. Trump supporters seem to have an inexhaustible well of forgiveness for him, so perhaps it wouldn't have changed the outcome (the Billy Bush "grab 'em by the pussy" tape certainly didn't, after all). But getting back to the facts, both sides agree that the payoff did actually take place, so there is no dispute about the core of the story. It is not merely "alleged," it did happen, in other words.

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Since it's been more than a few months, I thought today would be a good time to check in to see how President Donald Trump's job approval polling has been doing. There has been a lot of activity since the last time we looked, including two bumps and a slide. As always, the numbers discussed come from the Real Clear Politics "poll of polls" rolling average tracking page.

Right after I wrote about Trump's polls in mid-December, his numbers bottomed out at yet another low point for him -- 37.0 percent average job approval, and a whopping 58.1 percent average job disapproval. Since that time, Trump recovered to the point where he was seeing numbers he hasn't seen since the beginning of May, 2017. Of course, as with all things Trump, this is relative, because it only meant his job approval squeaking above 42 percent, rather than hovering in the 38-40 percent range. In other words, those are still pretty dismal approval numbers for a president entering his second year.

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Texas is perpetually, for Democrats, the one that got away. It's the pretty girl that wouldn't go out on a date with you in high school. It's the dream car of your youth you could never afford. It's the perfect job you applied for but didn't get. Democratic dreams of winning Texas are like a fourth-place Olympian's dreams of being on the podium -- so close, and yet so far. It's the impossible dream, but Democrats keep right on dreaming it anyway.

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There are two dots that are pretty easy (in retrospect) to connect, when looking for a reason for the hasty timing of President Trump's recent announcement of new steel and aluminum tariffs. In fact, the connection is so jaw-droppingly obvious (again -- after it is pointed out) that it's a mystery why more people inside the Beltway are seemingly not yet aware of it.

Last week, Trump announced a new 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum. Neither has been finalized yet, but the news certainly did make a splash in the financial world. But the dot that needs connecting to Trump's announcement is a political one, not an economic one. Because next Tuesday, voters in Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district will be heading to the polls in a closely-watched special House election. The district's old boundaries (which will be valid for next week's election, but which will then change for the midterm elections in November) contain all the suburbs of Pittsburgh to the south of the city, as well as some rural areas outside the metropolitan area. Pittsburgh, of course, is the city that named their professional football team "The Steelers."

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Once again, it is the end of another fun week at the White House. Let's see, we had the president's son-in-law stripped of his top secret security clearance (right as two brand new Jared Kushner scandals were revealed, just as icing on the cake). We had a cabinet member in hot water over buying a $31,000 table for his office, assumably so he could be more comfortable while slashing billions of dollars for poor people. The top North Korea expert at the State Department quit, out of frustration with Trump's incoherent policies. Trump met with the N.R.A., but then seemed to agree with everything Democrats proposed during a meeting on gun control -- after which, the N.R.A. met with Trump again in a desperate move to yank him back to their extreme positions. We had Trump smacking his own attorney general around again, and amusingly learned that Trump sometimes calls him "Mr. Magoo" behind his back. Trump so annoyed the president of Mexico in a phone call that he cancelled a planned meeting with Trump in Washington. We had Russia announce a new nuclear arms race, and Trump announce a new trade war -- apparently because he was so annoyed at all the other bad news that he wanted to create some of his own. After the inevitable pushback, he insisted on Twitter that "Trade wars are good, and easy to win!" Well, we're all about to find out, aren't we? And to cap the week off, one of Trump's closest advisors, Hope Hicks, testified before Congress that her job required her to tell "white lies" to the public on a regular basis. The next day, she announced she was leaving the White House.

In other words, business as usual!

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The box had been opened quite a while ago, if truth be told. It was a big box, of course -- a beautiful box, a tremendous box, a box like nobody had ever seen -- with such alabaster construction (although strangely tinged with orange, in a certain light) that people took to calling it the White Box. Promises were made early on that only the best would be allowed to be inhabit the box.

But then the lid of the White Box was pried up from within. The beings within the box crawled slowly out, one by one, making their escape (either in terror or in shame). Soon it became a flood of entities exiting the box, each with their own various reasons for their departure.

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The word "mercurial" is an elegant one, perhaps overly so. When used to describe President Donald Trump -- as it often is -- it lends him a certain majesty that he doesn't really deserve. Mercurial conjures up an image of quicksilver, liquid and shiny but impossible to pin down. Which is why so many in the media use the word to describe Trump, after all. But a more honest assessment would be that Trump just says whatever pops into his head at that particular moment, even if it blatantly contradicts something else he might have said minutes earlier.

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Jared Kushner's security clearance has been downgraded, the Washington Post reported today, from the highest level of access to the nation's secrets to the second-highest. This may not sound like much, but it will severely limit the information legally available to him -- he should no longer be able to read the president's daily briefing document put together by the national security apparatus, for example. This is important because it was recently disclosed that Kushner does actively read these daily briefings (or, at least, did so before last week). What it will mean in the larger sense for both Kushner and the rest of the Trump White House going forward is unclear, at this point.

Two Fridays ago, in the aftermath of the "wife-beaters in the White House" scandal, John Kelly sent out a memo stating that the highest security clearances which had been granted on a temporary basis (but had also been pending for the last eight months or more, to avoid new hires being unfairly swept up in the reclassification) would be revoked in one week's time. Last Friday, there was no official news out of the White House on Kushner's status, but President Trump was quoted essentially washing his hands of the issue. Trump could have overruled everybody and just granted Kushner his security clearance by fiat, but had apparently been convinced by advisors that it would harm him politically to do so. So Trump announced the decision was completely up to Kelly. And Kelly was apparently true to his word, and last week downgraded the highest security clearances for everyone covered by his memo. This included Jared Kushner.

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Senator Dianne Feinstein, the senior senator from California, failed to get her own party's endorsement for re-election last weekend. In a stunning vote of no confidence, the California Democratic Party not only refused to endorse Feinstein, but came very close to endorsing her biggest primary opponent instead. A total of 60 percent of the votes was needed for an official party endorsement. Feinstein got only 37 percent, while challenger Kevin De León got 54 percent. That's a pretty sharp rebuke from the state party, obviously.

Of course, none of this means Feinstein isn't still the frontrunner, or that she is going to lose her re-election bid. Feinstein winning again is still the safe bet, to put this another way. De León still trails Feinstein in the polling by 29 points, although at this point the public isn't paying all that much attention yet, so that may just be due to name recognition more than anything else. Feinstein, who will be 85 years old on Election Day, is already about as well-known as a California politician can get. Feinstein is also a prodigious fundraiser, and at the last election finance report had 30 times De León's total in her campaign chest (a third of a million dollars versus $9.8 million). Statewide California races are notoriously expensive, with spending that can top $50 million for a single candidate at times. Like a few other big states (Texas and Florida spring to mind), there are multiple major media markets which are all very expensive to advertise in, due to the number of large metropolitan areas within the state. Feinstein is well aware of this. De León, a state legislator, will be running his first statewide race.

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