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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The entire financial world is holding its breath right now, waiting to see whether they can continue their trust in official U.S. government economic figures or not. Will things like the official unemployment rate and inflation rate become just another casualty in Donald Trump's war on the truth and his war on science, or will the professionals who produce these numbers (as opposed to the agency's leader) continue to do a good and honest job -- even with the threat of being fired now hanging over their heads? That is an unanswered question, but we will begin to see fairly quickly which direction the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to head.

Over the course of the next month, there are multiple scheduled data releases before the next monthly jobs report comes out (usually on the first Friday after the end of a month, which would make it September 5th). There will be one more big jobs report and two inflation reports released in that time, and you can bet people will be watching closely to see whether they can be trusted or not.

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Today's job numbers are bad. There's no getting around it. So Donald Trump reacted to this bad news by immediately firing the messenger. Which is really bad. "Banana republic" bad, in fact. We should all expect Trump to name the next head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who will then dutifully report next month that "in August, America added eight million new jobs, thanks to our Dear Leader's brilliance." Because that is obviously what Trump wants to hear, instead of any proof that the fantasy world he inhabits in his head is rosier than the actual reality in which the rest of us live.

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As we head into the next few years, America will be experiencing more and more 250th anniversaries. Unlike the bicentennial we went through in 1976, these events will apparently be called by a number of different names (take your pick): semiquincentennial, sestercentennial, bisesquicentennial, or just quarter-millennial (I'm sure we'll all settle on one of these, by next July 4th). In any case, and whatever you call it, last Saturday was the 250th birthday of what became today's United States Postal Service.

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Today, former Vice President Kamala Harris ended all the speculation about her mounting a campaign to become California's next governor. By doing so, she amped up a bunch of speculation about her mounting a campaign to become president in 2028. As a Californian, I have to say I am relieved that Harris won't be running for governor next year, and I am also profoundly unexcited about the prospect of Harris running for president.

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The next few weeks could be fairly pivotal for the U.S. economy, with new monthly economic numbers being released telling us where we are now, while perhaps new tariff numbers will be imposed by the end of the week which may tell us where we are headed with the rest of the world. All of these outcomes hinge mostly on how Donald Trump's big trade war with the rest of the planet continues to play out.

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A half-century ago, a piece of conventional political wisdom was born. President Richard Nixon was eventually forced to resign his presidency due to the Watergate scandal -- the first time this had ever happened in America -- and the phrase: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" was born. The quote is not ascribed to any individual, it just became a commonplace way of talking about the scandal that engulfed Nixon and his administration. Today, in a sort of meta way, the White House is once again engulfed in a scandal, except this time it is once-more-removed. It's not the crime or the cover-up, it has now become "the cover-up of the cover-up" that bedevils Donald Trump.

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We have to begin today with an absurdity. It's been that kind of week....

This week, Donald Trump proved once again -- beyond the shadow of a doubt -- that his understanding of basic mathematics would be considered sub-par in any random fifth-grade math class in this country. Most 10-year-olds could spot Trump's glaring error, to put that another way.

Trump was speaking about lowering prescription drug prices when he veered off (as he is wont to do) into total absurdity. Here's how his boastful claim was reported (see if you can spot what is wrong with this statement):

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Back in the before-times... back when politics was fairly normal... we all had a special name for the time of year when Congress gives itself a 5- or 6-week vacation and political stories are thin on the ground. It was called the "Silly Season." It earned this moniker because in the dearth of actual political news being made, the mainstream media political types would zero in on some story that was (for one reason or another) just completely ridiculous. Mountains were made out of molehills. Idiotic stories would get blown out of proportion and enormous amounts of ink and airtime were devoted to dissecting whatever silly story everyone was obsessing about. A good time would be had by all, until Congress finally returned in September and started generating some actual political news once again.

Of course, all that changed with Donald Trump, since during his first term in office everything was: "All silly, all the time," no matter what month it happened to be. His "flood the zone" tactic of providing a firehose of distractions was always on full-blast, and so the news media always had some shiny object to chase no matter what time of year it was. August was no sillier than any other month, so the term fell out of use, for the most part.

This year, however, Silly Season seems to have come early, and indeed it is threatening to consume Donald Trump in a way never seen before -- because the pressure is coming from within his own party. And there's another new thing happening as well, because the story is so prominent that Trump's distractions simply are not working. Both of these are unprecedented events, for him.

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