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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Lo and behold, Democrats have finally found a good political narrative, heading into their big summer break. For once, they have woven a few disparate political issues into one poignant, easy-to-understand storyline. And for once, they are (so far, at least) all singing in unison from the same songbook.

Before I get to their message, though, there's one thing worth pointing out. In a lot of political analysis over the past few weeks, the biggest question pundits focus on is: "Will this help Democrats in the midterms?" Call it the horserace-centric way of looking at things. But the question is often presented too bluntly. Will any or all of this still be relevant to voters in any way one year from now? Well, maybe and maybe not. But it's not about whether Democrats have found the one key issue to run their entire midterm campaigns on or not -- instead, at this point (with the midterms still over a year away), the question is whether they can use the issues which are relevant now to lay down a foundational message that they can use to build upon later, as subsequent issues pop up (which they undoubtedly will, over the course of the next year). And on that scale, Democrats may have indeed found an excellent (and very adaptable) narrative. So that's the way I am measuring it, for the time being at any rate.

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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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