After watching and waiting all afternoon, it is looking like the talks at the White House will continue at least through dinnertime. So I decided that writing a column with only half-impressions (or half-baked impressions) of what was going on was a pointless waste of time, so I will not be posting a column today. Last Friday, as we were all staring at two empty podiums (podia?) for 45 minutes, waiting for the leaders to appear after their summit, I heard countless journalists wildly speculate that because the press conference had even been called it must mean they had a big deal to announce -- this was the consensus among pretty much everyone (as they killed time and filled the airwaves with sheer speculation).

Of course, it didn't turn out to be true. There was no big deal announced. There were no questions, even. The shortness of the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin meant that nothing much was decided at all.

So to avoid making as big a fool of myself as those reporters did last Friday, I am going to refrain from commenting now on the little tidbits that have been leaking out to the press all day and instead wait until tomorrow to more adequately (and accurately) comment on the White House meeting today. My apologies for the lack of a real column today.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

We begin today with a program note. Our normal "Friday Talking Points" format is going to be pre-empted today, since it is a historic occasion and everyone is following the same story. Yesterday's column can be considered a stand-in for a talking points column, as it was all about how Democrats should be talking about the economy right now, and earlier this week I wrote about the militarization of Washington D.C., which was the other big political story this week.

Today, however, all eyes are looking north to Alaska.

As I write this, the summit meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin has just begun. The two leaders met on the tarmac in a staged display of pomp, complete with red carpets and a shared limo ride to the building where the meetings will take place. Trump even applauded as Putin approached him, which is notable mostly for the difference in how Trump is treating Putin today and how he treated Volodymyr Zelenskyy when he visited the White House earlier this year (which was disgraceful, to say the least).

The best news so far is that Trump will not be sitting alone with Putin (with no one else present but interpreters). This is how Trump's first big meeting with Putin (back in his first term in office) took place, and it was universally condemned as a disaster. Trump lapped up Putin's lies in Helsinki, even when they directly contradicted what America's intelligence services had told him.

This time, to everyone's relief, there will be others in the room, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump's personal envoy to Putin (who has done all the negotiating so far). This will hopefully mean that Putin won't be able to play Trump like a violin this time around. Hopefully, that is.

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If they want to win the midterms next year, Democrats should really return in a big way to that old chestnut from the Bill Clinton era: "It's the economy, stupid." Because that is where both Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans are the weakest, and the economy is almost always either at or very near the top of the list of issues voters care the most about.

Donald Trump got elected on two big issues: immigration (deporting everyone in sight) and the economy. The public has soured on his handling of immigration, after seeing Trump's thuggish tactics, but on the subjects of the economy and inflation Trump scores his worst polling of any issue out there. Which makes it ripe for Democrats to bring up -- which they should, continually and unceasingly and relentlessly.

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While campaigning, Donald Trump promised the world he would end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office. Sometimes he even one-upped himself, suggesting he could probably end the war before he was even sworn in.

That, of course, didn't happen. Here we are more than 200 days in to Trump's second term, and the war rages on.

Donald Trump likes to see himself as a strongman -- a real "tough guy." But what we've seen is that he is at heart no more than a bully who immediately backs down when confronted with a truly strong opponent. Vladimir Putin is fully aware of this fact. Which all sets the stage for their summit meeting this Friday in Alaska.

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So apparently Washington D.C. is going to become an armed camp now. Donald Trump has taken control of the District's police force, sent a bunch of federal agents (from the F.B.I., D.E.A., etc.) out onto the streets, and has called up the National Guard, who will doubtlessly soon appear in full battle dress. All to solve a problem Trump is lying about. There really couldn't be a better argument for D.C. statehood, really, because if it were an actual state it would have an actual governor who might object to such tactics (to put it mildly).

This is more of what might be called "performative militarization" of the police, which Trump introduced in Los Angeles (again, to solve a problem Trump was lying about). The big difference here is that there were only a couple of buildings in L.A. that were federal property, so we had the spectacle of 4,000 National Guard soldiers and 700 U.S. Marines guarding a couple of buildings. It was preposterous on the face of it. But all of the District of Columbia is federal property, so Trump doesn't have to be so restrained.

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[Donald Trump today, while speaking on an unrelated subject:]

You know, I'm going to see Putin. I'm going to Russia on Friday.

[Friday, dateline Alaska. Donald Trump emerges from his meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin and takes the podium:]

I am pleased to announce that President Putin and I have made a deal. Part of it covers Ukraine, which I will get to in a little bit. But here's the big news -- I have agreed to sell back to Russia all of the state of Alaska above the Arctic Circle. Not a lot of people know this, but Russia actually owned all of Alaska a while ago. That's right! The land we're standing on right now was actually part of Russia -- who knew?

Now this may upset some people, but I want them to know this is the right thing to do. It's going to be beautiful. Nobody wanted all that land way up there -- even the waterfront properties were losers, since they were way too cold. So Putin has graciously agreed to take it all off our hands. Oh and for some reason he also wanted the Aleutian Islands so I agreed he could have those, too. This will make maps much easier for American schoolchildren, since they won't have to learn about these little, itty-bitty islands that are much closer to Russia anyway.

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Two stories dominated the political headlines this week: Texas Democrats fleeing the state to halt the Republican-dominated legislature's efforts to redraw their U.S. House district lines to hand Republicans five more safe seats, and Donald Trump letting incredibly high tariffs begin against over 90 countries worldwide.

We'll get to them in a moment, but what's more interesting is the dog that didn't bark today. Russia was supposed to have a "10-day deadline" to end its invasion of Ukraine, and steep tariffs were supposed to be slapped on them if Vladimir Putin hadn't manage to do so by today. However, nary a headline is talking about the tariffs that were supposed to appear, because once again Putin played Trump like a violin.

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The world's economy changed today. The United States slapped new tariffs on dozens of countries early this morning, following through on Donald Trump's repeated threats to do so. What this is all going to do to world trade and the American economy is really anyone's guess at this point, but it's definitely going to have some sort of effect. American economic policy has returned to a high-tariff scenario not seen in over 90 years, which adds to the uncertainty about what happens next. Since there is no modern data for where we find ourselves now, nobody really knows what is going to happen. But there are a few things that we can intelligently guess about, the first of which is that prices are going to rise for American consumers on all kinds of goods, some of which will be mild price hikes and some of which will be huge:

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We are now two days away from Donald Trump's latest arbitrary deadline with Russia's Vladimir Putin. Talks continued today, and seemed (from the little information released) to have at least been somewhat more productive than the last time any talks happened. But it's also highly unlikely that Putin will accept Trump's demand for a permanent ceasefire and a cessation of hostilities in Ukraine. The question now is what Putin will actually offer Trump and how Trump will react to it.

One development that seems to have come from the meeting is that both sides are talking about a possible meeting between Putin and Trump, perhaps as early as next week. Is this more of Putin's stalling, or a real indicator that some sort of solution is getting close? It's impossible to say. But it does seem like a good sign, at least.

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There's a slogan used by those who support redistricting reform that is worth starting with today: "Voters should pick their politicians; the politicians shouldn't be able to pick their voters." But the process of designing districts -- for U.S. House of Representatives seats as well as state legislative seats -- has long been a political process. The word "gerrymandering" was coined to describe a Massachusetts governor (Elbridge Gerry) who, while serving in office in 1812, approved a district so convoluted that a newspaper drew it as a mythical lizard with the name "the gerrymander." The name stuck, which shows you this sort of thing has been going on for over two centuries now.

Usually these battles are fought immediately after the decennial Census, as states have to adjust to a new number of House members (whether fewer or more). But it's not illegal for a state to redistrict mid-decade, which has been happening more and more frequently over the past couple of decades.

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