On Friday, President Donald Trump attempted a trick many previous U.S. presidents have used to good effect, and so far at least it seems to be working out for Trump quite well. The trick is to get sensitive news out late on a Friday, in the hopes that the American public (and the press) will be so distracted by the weekend that the story will have much less impact than it normally would have. Really bad news is usually released right before a three-day holiday weekend, so it'll have even less reach and an even-smaller impact. Trump took this to another level last Friday, by releasing some contentious news right in the midst of the biggest hurricane to hit the U.S. in over a decade.

So far, as I said, it appears to be working just fine for Trump. The media has been so consumed with reporting on the ongoing Harvey disaster that they have had little time or energy to focus on much of anything else. In the meantime, though, a lot has been going on.

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Donald Trump ping-ponged his way from being TelePrompTer Trump to being The Real Unfiltered Trump (and then back again) this week. It started off with a rather amazing flip-flop, as Trump essentially admitted that everything he's ever said or thought about Afghanistan was wrong. Not unlike Arthur Fonzarelli, Trump's mouth couldn't actually form the words "I was wrong," but the admission was still there for all to see.

Trump's new Afghanistan strategy is... well, he didn't want to tell us specifics. Even Bill O'Reilly responded to Trump's speech by tweeting: "The president's speech on Afghanistan was strong in tone but cloudy on specifics." But even so, it was pretty clear that Trump's Afghanistan strategy is pretty indistinguishable from Barack Obama's Afghanistan strategy or George W. Bush's Afghanistan strategy. In other words, throw up your hands and let the next president deal with it.

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Next month will be a busy one in Congress, with several crucial pieces of legislation (with looming deadlines) due. So, of course, President Donald Trump chose this particular moment to pick a meaningless fight with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. After all, what better time to antagonize the second-most powerful Republican in Washington?

Snarkiness aside, Congress certainly has a lot to accomplish in September, and so far it's looking like the Trump White House is going to be content to sit on the sidelines while occasionally lobbing mean tweets at fellow Republicans. This may all be to the good, in the end.

The two tasks Congress must accomplish before the end of September are to raise the debt ceiling and to pass some sort of budget. The budget must be in place before October dawns, or the government will shut down. The debt ceiling's deadline is a little more nebulous, but if we hit it then massive global financial disruption is likely the mildest of consequences. The debt ceiling should be the easiest for Congress to draft, as it essentially just picks a target number and that's the end of it. However, because it is must-pass legislation, the temptation to load it up with unrelated items will be strong (especially for the Tea Partiers). The big fight will likely become whether a "clean bill" should pass, or whether it should be used as a vehicle for legislative mischief.

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Maybe we all just misheard him. Maybe it was his outer-borough accent. Maybe what candidate Donald Trump really said was:

We're going to whine. We're going to whine so much. We're going to whine at trade, we're going to whine at the border. We're going to whine so much, you're going to be so sick and tired of whining, you're going to come to me and go: "Please, please, we can't whine anymore." You've heard this one. You'll say: "Please, Mr. President, we beg you, sir, we don't want to whine anymore. It's too much. It's not fair to everybody else." And I'm going to say: "I'm sorry, but we're going to keep whining, whining, whining."

It's certainly plausible. After all the debate surrounding whether Trump is saying "bigly" or "big league," the possibility that he really made a promise to whine so much we'd all get tired of it isn't so far-fetched. If true, it certainly has to be counted among the campaign promises that President Trump has kept. Because while listening to Trump's Arizona speech last night, I have to admit I was indeed tired of all the whining.

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Sorry, no column today. I was dealing with real-world stuff (automotive) all day, but was successful in the end, so at least it wasn't a day wasted.

Speaking of wasting time (during the political "silly season" month), rather than just a dry program note today (and because this is, after all, the internet), I'd like to share with everyone an image that truly answers the question of why there is life on Earth. Obviously, to provide an audience for cute cat images. So here you go, and rest assured that regular columns will resume tomorrow.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

There's a reason why Afghanistan is known as the "graveyard of empires." Ask the Soviets... or Alexander the Great, for that matter. The United States of America's war in Afghanistan has gone on far longer than any other conflict we've ever fought in, and there has been no real end in sight for a long time now.

That's the situation Donald Trump inherited as president, and it is (as he said tonight), "a bad and very complex hand" to play. But tonight's speech -- billed as the unveiling of Trump's new strategy for Afghanistan -- was actually more of a realization of this basic fact by Trump than any new military thinking. He openly admitted, for the first time I can really remember, that he was essentially wrong on the campaign trail when he promised quick victory and quick resolution of Afghanistan. That is momentous, since Trump rarely admits any mistakes whatsoever. This can be placed alongside his statement a few months back that healthcare reform was rather complicated (who knew?), in other words.

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Welcome back to Friday Talking Points! Let's see... anything big happen in the two weeks while we were away?

We're kidding, of course. The flood of sewage from Donald Trump's mouth was so pervasive, it was downright impossible to ignore it from anywhere on the planet. So last week we watched in fear as Trump got in a shoving match with Kim Jong Un, and this week we remained agape while Trump told us what he really feels about people who march with swastikas while screaming about Jews -- that they're "very fine people."

Hoo boy.

The most appropriate quote -- from inside the White House, mind you -- in reaction to Trump's impromptu press conference came from the Daily Beast:

"It was the president's decision to do this," another White House official (said) of Trump's free-wheeling at the press conference. Asked for a mini-review of Trump's press conference performance, the official would only respond, "clean-up on aisle Trump."

Brookings fellow Jamie Kirchick took the prize for best tweet in response to Trump: "When determining whether or not the president is a racist, I'll defer to the professional racists, who very much seem to think he is."

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Since President Donald Trump seems to be in such desperate need of some good advice, I thought today it'd be appropriate to offer up the following for his benefit, from two historic figures.

To begin with, we have none other than General Robert E. Lee -- whose statue in Charlottesville is at the heart of the current fight -- and who had some pretty specific words to say about those who would memorialize the so-called "Lost Cause." Lee wrote in August of 1865 to former governor of Virginia John Letcher, addressing what good citizens of the state should strive to do now that the war was over:

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So, America, are we tired of all that "winning" yet?

Yes, that was a facetious question, intended to point out that America is not so much tired of "winning" right now as it is increasingly tired of President Donald Trump's antics. Because his presidency just keeps right on hitting new lows, on a weekly basis (sometimes on a daily basis, in fact). Every time you think: "Well, he certainly can never top that one," he roars back to set the bar even lower, oftentimes with jaw-dropping impact.

The past few days has seen this cycle repeat once again. After some nuclear brinksmanship with North Korea and threatening Venezeula with military force, Trump turned to heal the racial divide in America. Well, no, he didn't. What he actually did was to pour a few gallons of gasoline on the fire, just to make it burn that much brighter.

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While I just finished watching President Donald Trump's rather extraordinary press conference today, it is going to take some time for me to process it before writing about it. So perhaps I'll get to it tomorrow, but for today I thought it was time for some light-hearted political fun. In short: a contest!

We haven't had one of these for awhile, but at this point I think everyone could use a distraction. The contest's rules are simple: pick the day when General John Kelly will exit his job as White House chief of staff. Bonus points are possible if you correctly pick the method of his exit (fired in a Trump rage, got so disgusted he had to go, caught in a compromising position with Russians/prostitutes/Ryan Lizza, etc.).

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