Congress is eagerly getting ready to take an enormous chunk of time off once again. The Republican House of Representatives even pushed their final day in session up by one day, to get a jump on their extended "August break." But to be fair, they didn't do this because they were over-eager to go on vacation, instead they did it out of political necessity, since they had earlier announced that there wouldn't be any more floor votes until after the break. And they did this because they are terrified of the entire Epstein files issue. So my question at this point is what are their own voters going to say to them when they do go back to their home districts? Are we going to see lots of videos of town halls where their constituents rake them over the coals for not forcing the public release of the full Epstein files, or will it be more of a non-issue?

This is a rather important question, because it will be some measure of how much the MAGA base really does care about the issue. Up until now, we've heard from Donald Trump and the administration, Republicans in Congress, and popular right-wing influencers and journalists. But we haven't really heard from the actual GOP base voters in any big way.

Some Republicans in Congress have been claiming that the calls coming into their office are now "almost 100 percent" about the Epstein files. Others have claimed that "nobody has been mentioning it." Either Republican voters in differing districts care quite differently about the issue, or somebody's lying. And it will be interesting to see which one of these it is.

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Why is Russia so special to Donald Trump? Why does Trump always give Vladimir Putin a free pass? Those are questions that have long been asked (for various reasons), ever since Trump entered politics. But no matter what the actual answer is (many have speculated, but nobody truly knows, other than Trump himself), the fact that Trump treats Vladimir Putin's Russia with kid gloves is an incontrovertible fact.

The most recent glaring example of this is how Russia has (up to this point) been declared exempt from Trump's global trade war. Trump has been all over the map with his tariff threats, but one part of it has remained consistent: a 10 percent tariff on all countries, no matter what. This initially included every country Team Trump could find on a map -- including one solely populated by penguins -- but not Russia.

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Once again, this week was consumed by an out-of-control political fire that is engulfing Donald Trump, his attorney general, the F.B.I., and all of Trump's fellow Republicans in Congress. They built a political Ponzi scheme out of the Epstein files, and it has now completely collapsed around them.

Now, we did consider using "the gift that keeps on giving" as our sub-headline today (since it would apply to the Democrats' position in all of this), but in the end we felt that it was too disrespectful a phrase to use for the situation. After all, Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile who trafficked in underage girls that he personally sexually abused and made available to his rich and powerful buddies. There are a huge number of victims of his crimes, to put this another way. And they were pretty heinous crimes, which makes it no laughing matter at all.

But the political fire isn't over Epstein or his personal crimes -- it is over who else may have participated in them. And what evidence there may be for it all. Donald Trump and the entire MAGA movement has been hyping the conspiracy theory around "the Epstein files" for years now. Trump explicitly promised to reveal all, once he got back into office.

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I should start out by clarifying that headline. When I say "Trump Is Getting Weaker," I am not referring to the news today that Donald Trump is suffering from problems with the veins in his legs and the bruising on his hands. I speak not of physical weakness, but instead of political weakness. And I'm going to mostly set aside the continuing internecine battle among Republicans over the Jeffrey Epstein files as well, since although the issue has been making headlines for weeks now, there is something much more interesting going on in the background. While Trump flails around desperately trying to somehow pin all the blame over the Epstein files cover-up on Democrats (which isn't convincing anyone), the widening schism within his own party has happened independently from some much larger trends. Democrats are gleefully trolling Trump and the Republicans over the Epstein files fiasco, but no matter what the upshot of it all turns out to be, the fact will remain that Trump is getting a whole lot weaker on pretty much every other issue under the sun. Sooner or later, Democrats should start making some political hay out of this weakness (assumably, after the Epstein files tempest blows over).

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A month ago, the 250th anniversary of what is known as "The Battle of Bunker Hill" was celebrated in Boston. This was the first major battle in the American Revolution (Lexington and Concord had happened earlier, but they were more running skirmishes than a set-piece battle). Every American schoolchild knows (at the very least) this battle's name, and perhaps the legend (probably apocryphal) that the American rebels were told: "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," and that's about it.

This is somewhat intentional, I have to believe, since the battle itself was such a masterpiece of military incompetence, on both sides. The Americans picked the wrong ground to defend, while the British absolutely refused to attack in a way which would have all but guaranteed victory. Neither side really "won" -- the Americans were eventually forced to retreat, but the British suffered incredibly heavy losses, making their "victory" no more than a Pyrrhic one at best.

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House Democrats are moving quickly to capitalize on the growing schism in the Republican Party, hoping to jam a wedge between Donald Trump and his own MAGA base over the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory. Democrats are now the ones forcing votes on releasing "the Epstein files," because they know what an untenable position it puts the Republicans in. They can either vote to release the files or they can (gasp!) vote for the cover-up to continue! You can see why Democrats are having so much fun with it all.

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Representative Ro Khanna seems to be following one of James Carville's pithy bits of political advice: "When your opponent is drowning, throw the son-of-a-bitch an anvil." Khanna announced that today he would be introducing a resolution in the House which would force the Trump administration to release all the remaining files on Jeffrey Epstein.

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Remember when Donald Trump pitched a hissy fit because he didn't like the way a portrait of him looked, in Colorado? He actually made them take it down and create a new painting. So we're wondering if someone's about to get fired in the White House, after they used an official White House social media account to post an image of Trump as (are you sitting down?) Superman. Now, the idea of "Trump as Superman" isn't all that shocking, since both he and all his acolytes operate at the mental level of a spoiled elementary-school-aged narcissist, but what is truly hilarious is the image they used -- because they didn't bother to edit out his gut. It's just sticking right out there for all to see. Usually when Trump has these he-man fantasies he uses fake images with lots of muscles and a ripped body, but this time someone forgot to tell the A.I. program to slim him down. So, as we said, we're anticipating someone in the White House communications department getting unceremoniously booted from their job real soon now. It's kind of surprising they'd even use the Superman theme in the first place, since the MAGA folks all hit the ceiling when the director of the new Superman movie pointed out the fact that Superman is actually (gasp!) an immigrant. And it is highly doubtful that the Kent parents ever bothered to inform the federal government of the fact, so that would actually make Superman an undocumented immigrant. Oh, the horror!

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When the Supreme Court rules, in many instances it issues the final legal word on a particular issue. Congress can always try to legislate changes to the law after such a ruling, but as far as the judicial system is concerned, once the Supreme Court rules all lesser judges must follow their ruling. But this legal finality is not always true, because a Supreme Court ruling can, in many instances, only address one particular legal facet of the underlying constitutional case. The high court sometimes takes this route intentionally, ruling on one legal detail and then returning the case back to the lower courts for further proceedings -- allowing the initially-filed case to continue, just with new technical (and limited) instructions from the Supreme Court about how the lower judges should handle it. And although some saw the Supreme Court's recent decision on Donald Trump's executive order which attempted to redefine what birthright citizenship means in the Fourteenth Amendment as the final legal word, it was not. It wasn't even close to a final decision, since the Supreme Court actually completely ignored the underlying constitutional issue in question. Instead, they used the case to make a sweeping ruling limiting lower-court judges to issue nationwide injunctions which block some move by the president or his administration. By doing so, they overturned a nationwide injunction which barred the Trump administration from attempting to implement his new definition (which would have severely limited the grant of citizenship for babies born on American soil). But they put their order on a 30-day pause, and they left a loophole.

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I have decided that today is a fine day to play hooky.

I apologize for this, but given the niceness of the summer day here and the choice between enjoying it fully and writing a very snarky column, I chose the former. What I would have written about was the gleeful schadenfreude those of us who live in the reality-based world have been feeling at watching those who live in the MAGA world absolutely melt down over the revelation that one of their favorite conspiracy theories has turned out to be just that -- not based in anything other than feverish swamp dreams.

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