The New York Times has its Trumpiest headline ever.

Here's the article: "Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back/In a flurry of unilateral executive actions, Mr. Trump revived disputed claims of broad presidential authority from his first term — and made some new ones. Court battles seem likely."

That's by Charlie Savage. Excerpt:

"I am monitoring this trend of MSM comments that make anything into an occasion to bring up Trump."

I said, in the comments to a post yesterday, because I felt that I needed to explain why I saw fit to quote a comment that appeared in the NYT: "I find that imagining I am going to wake in the morning and read in the NY Times that Trump is dead puts me to sleep immediately." 

It was an article promising tips on how to get back to sleep when you wake up in the middle of the night. Trump doesn't belong there! Maybe someone who loves Trump could get back to sleep contemplating Trump, but here's a reader who loathes Trump and feels compelled to shoehorn her hate into a discussion about how to relax. So she envisions him dead! Now, death is also not a good subject for lulling yourself back to sleep, but the commenter brought in death because it was a way to make the subject of hating Trump cozy and comfortable. 

As for my comment — "I am monitoring this trend of MSM comments that make anything into an occasion to bring up Trump" — it prompted retail lawyer to say:

Ann, you're going to need a bigger blog, as Insty says. Scott Adams today was talking about "Long haul TDS." It seems to be a real thing, but I know of no well-done studies on the syndrome.

A blog will accommodate whatever you want to put in and will forgive you for any and all lapses in comprehensiveness. That is to say, I'll just do posts on the topic when I run into things, and I run into things sometimes by opening up a comments section on an article — usually in the NYT or the Washington Post — and doing a search for "Trump." 

I'm going on intuition, but what inspires me to do a search is an article that I'm already reading — because I'm interested in the topic — that has nothing to do with Trump. A place where Trump does not belong. I bet Trump's in there, I think. Or: I wonder how long it will take the commenters to connect this to Trump. 

I mean, there was an article on getting back to sleep. Can you get from that to Trump? Yes!

"Mr. Jacobs’s parody of the Great American Songbook prompted Irving Berlin and a group of song publishers representing the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others to sue..."

"... Mad’s parent company, E.C. Publications, for copyright infringement. At issue was 'Sing Along With Mad,' a pullout section published in 1961 that consisted entirely of song parodies by Mr. Jacobs and Larry Siegel. Among them were 'Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady' (a lampoon of Berlin’s 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody') and 'The First Time I Saw Maris' (a spoof of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'), about the commercialization of the Yankee slugger Roger Maris during the season he hit a record-breaking 61 home runs.... In his opinion, [2d Circuit] Judge Irving R. Kaufman (most famous for presiding over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial) wrote, 'The fact that defendants’ parodies were written in the same meter as plaintiffs’ compositions would seem inevitable if the original was to be recognized, but such a justification is not even necessary; we doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.'"

From "Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine Writer With a Lyrical Touch, Dies at 91/He deftly mocked pop culture, politics and more for 57 years/He also wrote new lyrics for familiar songs, which led to a lawsuit from Irving Berlin and others" (NYT).

1961 — I think that's about when I discovered Mad. I was 10! It was the first thing I ever subscribed to. The writings of Frank Jacobs played such an important role in the development of my young mind.

(To comment, you need to email me — here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Retail Lawyer:

"When President Obama told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in March 2012 that 'after my election I have more flexibility'..."

"...most assumed he was referring to foreign policy. It turns out Mr. Obama's ambitions weren't so limited."

IN THE COMMENTS: retail lawyer writes:

Question for Ann: How are law schools explaining this new flexibility, promulgation, the Take Care clause, etc.? How do you think they'll be teaching it in the future? Sometimes I wish I still were in law school.

And I said:

I'd quote Justice Jackson in the Steel Seizure Case:

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers.

"The tools belong to the man who can use them."

It's a great line.

But sometimes you've just got tools lying around, and no one can use them too well, and some men and women try to use them to halfway build something and then they leave it leaking and creaking for some other man to whip into shape with those tools, which he's not too good at using, but he keeps tinkering away, ineptly, and everyone watches and bitches about it, and you've just got some huge hulking crappy thing that's never going to work right, but so much damned effort was put into building the thing that we just go ahead and use it anyway.