In another four days, we will have survived the first full year of Donald Trump's second term in office. That's right -- one down, only three more to go!

(Sigh.)

The defining feature of this past year has been -- just like it was in his first term -- the continuing cycle of being so aghast at Trump's planet-sized ego, flailing insecurities, and toddler-grade tantrums and thinking to oneself: "Well, it surely can't get any worse than this!" -- only to wake up the next morning, read the headlines, and find out that yep, it sure can get worse, in ways you would never have imagined in a million years, pre-Trump.

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Donald Trump is approaching his own Rubicon, it seems. The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. "Burning your bridges" is a slightly-different metaphor with a similar meaning. For Trump, the Rubicon he is contemplating crossing is invoking the Insurrection Act to send in U.S. armed forces to an American city.

Once crossed, this will likely become a favorite response for Trump to any protests he doesn't like, which is why I see it as his Rubicon. The Act places not just total control but all decision-making in the hands of the president. He doesn't have to consult Congress or any governor or mayor, the president instead just decides on his own to send in the Marines (or Army or anyone else he feels like) to occupy American territory. Martial law may or may not be invoked in a de jure way, but it will be instituted in a de facto way no matter what. Soldiers armed with weapons of war will patrol the streets and decide what is allowable and what is not.

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The Democratic Party -- and liberalism in general -- needs to take a stand. So far, they have mostly been reactive, fighting back against Donald Trump and his administration. Trump will do something outrageous, and Democrats then react to it. But there's no cohesive plan to any of it -- nothing that ties it all together into an actual political agenda. So it would behoove them to steal a page (actually a whole lot of pages) from the Republicans, and come up with a "Project 2029" document that lays out what their vision of the federal government would be, if they win the White House and Congress.

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Last week, I wrote an article noting that Republicans in Congress were showing signs of life, by standing up for themselves instead of just allowing Donald Trump to do whatever he feels like doing at any particular moment. I ended by wondering if this would prove to be a trend, since Republicans in Congress will have to face their voters later this year in the midterm elections -- meaning their own self-interest (in getting re-elected) might become more important to them than appeasing Trump. Several developments that seem to point to Republicans being more willing to contradict Trump have appeared since then, although none of them were as dramatic as actually voting against Trump's wishes (as happened last week). But they're still worth pointing out.

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Metaphorically, you could go with either pigs or clocks. Take your choice: "Even a blind pig can sometimes find an acorn," or: "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day." But perhaps that's too dismissive, since Donald Trump suddenly championing an issue that originated among progressive Democrats is not really just random chance. Trump is doing so for his own political benefit, plain and simple. But in this particular case, progressives should still try to work with him to see if some sort of deal could actually be achieved. Because the biggest beneficiary could be the American people.

Right now, Trump is worried -- and he has every right to be. He is worried about Republicans' chances in the midterm elections, and he deeply fears Democrats retaking control of the House (or perhaps even the Senate, too). He knows Congress won't continue to act as his doormat for the final two years of his term if that happens. And Trump also knows he is most vulnerable on the economy.

Trump campaigned in 2024 on how he would magically bring down prices on everything "on Day One." We are approaching the milestone of his first year in office, however, and prices on all sorts of things remain high -- and they've gotten worse due to Trump's tariffs (which are nothing more than a tax on American consumers). So he is floundering around seeking some quick fix that will make him more popular on the economic front. He's recently latched onto a number of ideas, and this weekend floated a new one: a one-year limitation on credit card companies to charge no more than 10 percent interest.

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It has been a week of stunning events and dangerous rhetorical excesses. Currently the political debate is divided over the question of when government officials can use deadly force against people who are protesting or ignoring orders from those officials. This question is steeped in politics, as it so often is. Whether a person deserves death at the hands of the state almost always has a political element to it, which is not exactly a new thing.

Here's a quick test, just to prove the point. If there is an unruly crowd of people hurling not just verbal abuse but physical objects -- snowballs loaded with ice, chunks of rock pried up from the street, frozen horse manure, and anything else they can get their hands on and throw -- at a contingent of government officers, some of whom were being knocked to the ground and injured by the incoming rain of projectiles, would they be justified if they shot into the crowd in their own self-defense -- and killed some of the crowd?

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Congress is actually showing some signs of standing up for itself. This is remarkable, since for the past year they have been no more than a rubber stamp, approving anything Donald Trump wants while ignoring anything he does to encroach on their constitutional powers. Today, however, several votes were held which did indeed push back on Trump in notable ways. All of them will likely wind up being merely symbolic, but it is still refreshing to see at least some signs of life from Congress.

There were three such significant votes today, two in the House and one in the Senate. Let's take a look at each of them and what they could mean going forward.

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There's an issue emerging in the political world that -- so far -- has not adequately been addressed by either party. This means there is a big opportunity for one of them to jump onto the populist side of the issue and get out in front of a growing amount of rage among some voters. So far, though, neither party seems all that interested, meaning the deep pockets of the industry leaders might win out over how average voters see the issue. So far, the only politician positioning himself on the side of average people is (no real surprise) Senator Bernie Sanders. Everyone else, to one extent or another, seems to be either supporting or ignoring the impact of new data centers being built all across the country.

Data centers are buildings that house rack after rack of computers. This concentration of computing power is currently necessary to run the artificial intelligence programs that are increasing their reach into people's lives in a big way. The problem is that most people are not really benefiting from this explosion of a new computing industry -- least of all, those who have to live next to the new data centers being built.

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Today is the fifth anniversary of the attempted violent insurrection at the United States Capitol. We all watched it play out on live television, as a riotous mob attacked police officers who were doing their duty defending the building and the members of Congress inside it. We saw it all with our own eyes, both on that sad day and afterwards, as more video footage was released. It is obvious what the video footage shows. All you have to do is watch it to understand exactly what happened that day.

Donald Trump, however, has an alternate version of history. And now that he's president again, his delusional fantasy has become the official U.S. history of the event. The White House today posted a new webpage detailing Trump's version of the day, which bears little resemblance to the truth of what happened (which, once again, we all saw with our own eyes).

The word "Orwellian" gets tossed around in political analysis, sometimes with justification and sometimes without. But it's hard to call such a rewrite of history anything but Orwellian. Trump is attempting to toss the reality down the "memory hole" of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. His version of the "Ministry of Truth" has already been running rampant over many historical truths in American history, dictating to museums and the National Park Service what can and cannot be said about our shared history. The evils of slavery, for instance, are being tossed down the memory hole as well. And that's just one prominent example.

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Donald Trump is not being subtle about why he decided to launch a military attack against Venezuela and spirit away their country's leader, Nicolás Maduro. Instead of Trump's previous attempts to cloak his naked power grab with some sort of justification, he now just flat-out admits "it's about the oil." Venezuela has a lot of oil in the ground -- more than any other country on the planet, in fact. Trump wants it for the U.S. So he's going to force them to allow American companies to go in and take it, one way or another.

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