From the beginning, the administration of Donald Trump has been providing roughly one scandal per week. Not a week went by without some explosive story appearing in the headlines. That pace, obviously, was unsustainable. Incredibly, however, this pace is now rapidly increasing. Last week, we moved into "scandal of the day" territory, and are now fast approaching "scandal of the hour." Welcome to the Scandalpalooza that is the Trump administration!

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The American presidency is being dumbed-down before our very eyes. It's as if we're all trapped within one of those "child in an adult body" movies (think: Big or Freaky Friday), awaiting the next wacky turn of events to play out across our screens. What will "Kid President" do next? Throw a tantrum on Twitter? Fire somebody else at the White House? Yell at his subordinates again? Try to fire Congress? Cause an international incident by doing something extremely rude while meeting the Pope? Stay tuned, the next unbelievable plot twist is right around the corner!

If that sounds a bit loopy, well, it's been a loopy sort of week. Last Monday, Sally Yates testified before a Senate committee about the firing of Michael Flynn. Tuesday, President Donald Trump fired F.B.I. Director James Comey because he was being too enthusiastic about investigating Trump's Russia ties, after which Trump sent all his White House underlings (including Vice President Mike Pence) to go out and peddle a complete lie about why Comey was fired. Wednesday, Trump was meeting in the Oval Office so he could give away secret intelligence to the Russians -- while barring American press from the event, but allowing Russian photographers to document the loving smiles all around. Thursday, Trump was on NBC, flat-out admitting that the Russia investigation was why Comey was fired. Friday, Trump was threatening Comey with "tapes" of their conversations, in what could be termed "attempted witness tampering." This week, we've already had a bombshell per day, with the revelations that (1) Trump gave away secrets Israel shared with us to the Russians, and (2) Comey took meticulous notes of all conversations with Trump, including one where Trump told him to "let Flynn go" and to let the whole Russia investigation go, for good measure. Who wouldn't be a little loopy after all of that?

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I thought it'd be fun today to take a look at President Donald Trump's poll numbers. This is mainly because any casual interpretation of such polling would have to conclude that Trump's numbers are about to fall off a cliff. So I thought it'd be fun to take a "before" snapshot, to see where Trump was before the whole "telling secrets to Russia in the Oval Office" thing is reflected in his job approval polling. Over the next week or two, the impact of this week's scandal will become clear, but for now the polling data doesn't reflect any of it.

If I had to summarize where Trump finds himself with the public in a Trumpian tweet, it'd have to be: "Trump poll #s still terrible. Sad! Obama miles better." That pretty much says it all. On the Real Clear Politics polling average page, Trump is currently at 40.7 percent average job approval and 53.9 percent disapproval. At the same point in his term, Barack Obama was at a whopping 60.8 percent approval and only 32.0 percent disapproval -- over 20 percent better, in both directions, than Trump.

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The war against the Islamic State, currently being waged (to varying degrees) by the United States, Iraq, Iraqi Kurds, Iran, Syria, Syrian Kurds, Syrian Rebels, Turkey, and Russia is approaching a big turning point. The Islamic State has been steadily losing territory for over a year now, and they're on the brink of losing control over the two most important cities in their self-proclaimed caliphate: Mosul and Raqqa. This could be a death blow to the Islamic State's territorial claims, although the group itself will probably survive as a stateless international terrorist organization (much like Al Qaeda).

This war is both complicated and slow, which are two reasons why Americans haven't been paying much attention to it lately. Military alliances shift as you cross the Syrian/Iraqi border, and Syria is engaged in its own multiyear civil war, of which the fight against the Islamic State is but one part. Complexities abound, which isn't really that surprising for a conflict in the Middle East.

Putting most of those complexities aside, though, when you focus solely on the Islamic State, it's pretty obvious that they're losing, and losing badly. By the end of the year (at the latest), the Islamic State could lose control of all the territory in Iraq they once held. The situation in Syria is much harder to predict, but even there the Islamic State's footprint is definitely shrinking.

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We always wanted to kick off with an authentic tabloid headline, and this week just seemed like the perfect time. "Trump Dumps Top Cop" just seems somehow appropriate -- we've got a tabloid president, so why not go whole hog on the tabloid headlines?

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.

At this point it's hard not to call Trump Nixonian -- and that was true before today's threats about possible "tapes" made in the White House ("James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"), and about the possibility of just ending press conferences altogether. With that thrown into the mix, it's hard to come up with any other descriptor than "Nixonian."

Even Nixon's own presidential library had the occasion to (1) troll the sitting president, (2) have some fun, and (3) boost the reputation of Richard M. Nixon's presidency. We're betting they've never seen such a trifecta before! Here's what they tweeted in the midst of all the frenzy: "FUN FACT: President Nixon never fired the Director of the FBI #FBIDirector #notNixonian."

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[Program Note: This article was originally supposed to run on Tuesday. Given the late-breaking news about James Comey, however, I had to pre-empt it. So while I think I've cleaned up all the "last night" phrases to read "Monday night," if I've missed a few, this is the reason why and I apologize in advance.]

The medieval idea of a court jester has always been an intriguing one -- the motley fool sitting at the foot of the throne with near-absolute impunity for any improper thing he might say. Now, I have no real idea how historically valid the stereotype is, or how prevalent the phenomenon ever actually was. Ye kings of olde never seemed restrained enough in the use of absolute power to put up with a jester constantly cracking wise (for the lords and ladies of the court to titter at), but then my knowledge of this period is sketchy at best. I am no medieval historian, so who's to know how valid or widespread the concept ever actually was?

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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Donald Trump hasn't even been in office for four whole months, and already he's being compared to Richard Nixon. That is both stunning as well as somewhat expected, really. Just on personality alone, Trump seems the most Nixonian figure to occupy the Oval Office since Tricky Dick himself roamed the hallways. Sooner or later, Trump's penchant for vengeance against his perceived enemies was going to cause some problems. It's now obvious that "sooner" won out over "later."

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I had an article all ready to go today, and then I took a quick peek at the news. Which caused me to go back and start all over again. Because James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, has just been fired. Obviously, I'm not going to have any in-depth analysis, since this happened less than an hour ago (as I write this).

My snap judgment is my reaction to the stated reason from the Trump White House for Comey's firing: Comey improperly influenced the presidential election by his actions 11 days before people voted. His letter to Congress announcing he was reopening the investigation into Clinton's emails is now, for some unfathomable reason, a firing offense.

My reaction: BWAH HAH hah hah hah hah! Ha! Snicker, snicker....

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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.

Lost in all of the politics surrounding the Muslim travel ban court cases is the fact that this ban was only supposed to be temporary. Even when Donald Trump announced a "complete ban on Muslims" back on the campaign trail, it was pitched as a stop-gap measure which would quickly be lifted after "extreme vetting" was put into place. If you carefully read Trump's statements on the issue (which the Fourth Circuit is currently doing), he almost always presents the travel ban itself as merely a means to an end. This end, specifically, was supposed to arrive 90 days after the travel ban order was signed.

Trump's first executive order on the issue was signed on January 27th. That, if I've counted correctly, was 101 days ago. Eleven days longer than the initial ban was supposed to last, in other words.

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The Republican healthcare reform bill is now officially out of Paul Ryan's hands, at least for the time being. Which means it's time for us to rebrand it here. Up to this point, we've been calling it Ryancare (Ryancare 2.0, for the latest go-round). Democrats have already been calling it Trumpcare, for obvious political reasons. But we have to say, we favor a suggestion we first read in someone's online comment to a healthcare reform article (which we read so long ago that we only remember the idea, and not the originator, sorry). It was probably in the Washington Post, but we couldn't swear to it. Wherever we read it, we got a good laugh out of it and have decided to adopt it as our own.

Instead of using his last name (which he loves), why not use a diminutive version of his first name (which he apparently hates) instead? Add in his last name's initial, and it becomes: "DonTcare." Personally, we feel this perfectly captures the entire Democratic argument, using only eight letters: Donald T's "don't care what's in it, don't care how many of my voters it will screw, as long as Congress passes some bill or another so I can brag about it!" health care plan. DonTcare. Rolls off the tongue, don't it? Well, typing it does take some getting used to -- but without that second capitalization, it'd be a lot harder to read. Trump DonTcare. And while we certainly can't claim credit for coining the term, we do encourage others to use it freely -- it even saves characters in tweets!

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