Greetings and welcome to this week’s midair performance of the Carnival of Fools! Like a prestige subscription-service drama, our story resumes from a potent cliff-hanger: Last week, Donald Trump had invoked the laws of cartoon physics as he strapped an ACME-brand tariff regime onto America’s economy and sent it hurtling off a cliff.

It is a fool’s errand to try to rationalize President Trump’s obsession with tariffs.

In his opening weeks back in office, President Trump is asserting power in a way that pushes hard on, and sometimes past, the boundaries of executive authority.

One of the most important of those boundaries involves his relationship with independent regulatory agencies. Mr. Trump is the first president since the 1930s to assert control over many of them, and this assertion of power will almost certainly be tested in the Supreme Court.

U.S. President Donald Trump could sign an executive order as soon as this week that will dissolve the Postal Board of Governors and allow him to take over the U.S. Postal Service, and a postal workers union isn't taking the news all too well.

Trump is planning to absorb the USPS into the White House and fire the postal board, The Washington Post reported Thursday, citing six people familiar with the plans. Such a move can potentially result in turmoil for trillions worth of e-commerce transactions, as per the report.

President Trump is making plans to disband the governing board that oversees the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the agency into his administration, throwing the future of the mail provider’s quasigovernmental status into doubt.

Trump is preparing to issue an executive order, possibly this week, to fire the members of the Postal Service’s governing board and put the agency under the direct control of the Commerce Department, according to two government officials. The plan was earlier reported by the Washington Post late Thursday.

Not a sentence said by a Democrat these days doesn’t have a subject, a verb and “constitutional crisis.” 

President Trump wanting to halt spending while he reviews a government in massive debt is an “assault on Democracy,” a “circumvention of Congress” and, in typical understatement, an “executive coup.” 

Balderdash.

The U.S. Constitution established three branches of government, designed to balance power — and serve as checks on one another. That constitutional order suddenly appears more vulnerable than it has in generations. President Trump is trying to expand his authority beyond the bounds of the law while reducing the ability of the other branches to check his excesses. It’s worth remembering why undoing this system of governance would be so dangerous to American democracy and why it’s vital that Congress, the courts and the public resist such an outcome.

In the first weeks of his second term, President Donald Trump has wasted no time in flexing his political muscle. That much is clear.

Since taking office in January, he has ordered the suspension of all new asylum claims, cancelled refugee resettlement, frozen government hiring and spending, gutted agencies established by Congress, banned gender transition care for teenagers and offered a buyout deal for hundreds of thousands of federal workers.

I would not put much stock in media coverage or political rhetoric suggesting that the federal courts are in revolt against President Trump and his efforts to rein in government size and spending. Undoubtedly, there are some progressive judges (mainly those appointed by Presidents Obama and Biden) who are philosophically sympathetic to claims that the president is interfering with the safe, professional operation of the administrative state -- as if the chief executive has no say in how executive agencies conduct business.

President Trump has pardoned former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was convicted of corruption-related crimes, including trying to sell a U.S. Senate seat vacated by former President Barack Obama.

Blagojevich served as the state's governor from 2003-'09. It was a political saga toward the end of his time in office.