Normally one is inclined to avoid cliches like the plague. But sometimes you just need to latch onto one.
And the golden oldie "a week is a long time in politics" just seems so right for this moment. And it's certainly been one of those weeks in DC. Not that it's over yet.
Indeed, I had barely written that line when my phone pinged with the news that US President Donald Trump had commuted the seven-year prison sentence imposed on disgraced former congressman George Santos.
The Republican had flipped a Democrat seat in New York in the 2022 midterms but was soon exposed as a fraud and a fraudster.
He pleaded guilty to campaign finance charges last year and has been in prison since July. His behaviour was outrageous, but he was a Trump loyalist. This story will be a one-day wonder, if that.
It might add a little pepper to the second running of "No Kings Day", the series of protests in cities across the USA against the singular governing style of President Donald J Trump. But then again, maybe not: there is just so much pepper around these days.
Some of them in the form of pepper spray or balls of pepper fired from shotguns. Like the pepper balls blasted at the head of a local pastor (in clerical garb) who was involved in a protest outside an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) centre in Chicago.
The protests there are not big, but even down here in DC you can sense the rising tension from frayed community relations with law enforcement in general. But in particular it's the masked, combat gear wearing gendarmerie engaged in the clampdown on illegal immigration that is roiling communities in a number of big cities. Videos of ICE agents violently arresting people are proliferating on social media.
ICE and the border patrol have been undergoing explosive growth as large numbers of new officers are recruited, trained and sent out on mission, paid for by a huge budget increase in the "One Big Beautiful Bill". By some estimates, their combined number makes the immigration cops the biggest police force in the US.
According to the website of the Department of Homeland Security, "ICE has received more than 150,000 applications from patriotic Americans who want to defend the homeland by removing the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens from the US," said Secretary Kristi Noem.
"We have already issued more than 18,000 tentative job offers. Americans are answering their country's call to serve and help remove murderers, pedophiles, rapists, terrorists, and gang members from our country."
That's on top of the 6,500 already working for the Agency.
And according to the Cato Institute, which benefitted from leaked information, ICE has been able to divert other Federal and local law enforcement officers into its anti-immigration task forces. According to Cato, there are a total of 25,320 such officers on secondment to ICE immigration control operations, 14,500 of them being Federal officers from agencies like the FBI and ATF.
Although most of the action has been in cities, the countryside is not immune. The Federal Department of Labour warned during the week that labour shortages driven by the clampdown on agricultural workers could result in food shortages.
Price rises are how shortages express themselves in a nation plagued by obesity and type two diabetes rather than starvation. But in a country that has seen skyrocketing price rises over the past four years, the prospect of more - especially basic foodstuffs - is alarming for politicians. Not to mention that half of the population is already struggling with bills.
Those who pay attention to financial markets are also growing increasingly restive over gold price, dollar value, corporate earnings - strip out the big ten technology stocks, and there has been precious little growth in the rest of corporate America. A ten percent rise in the price of Gold this week alone is setting alarm bells ringing. Most aren't sure what it signals, but some think it's a rush for the exits.
By the end of the week the dollar value of gold had overtaken the Euro to become the second biggest store of value in the world. After the dollar itself. Which has been sliding against the Euro and other currencies for most of the year.
High interest rates, a housing shortage, falling housing output, youngsters paying crazy prices for homes, a rise in the number of delinquent car loans and subprime mortgages. Deja vu for those who remember 2008.
And what is the government doing about all this? Not much. The government has been shut down for three weeks, and there is no sign of the budget standoff that caused the shutdown ending soon.
What is remarkable is how normal and unremarked on, this shutdown situation is. To the Political Wire podcast this weekend, the shutdown is the most normal thing in US politics right now.
Even the Epstein files are finding it hard to break into this "new normal". One of the consequences of the party-political standoff on Capitol Hill has been the searing into office of Adelita Grijalva, who won a by-election in Arizona three and a half weeks ago.
Normally, new Congressfolk are sworn in and seated within days of their elections. But Speaker of the House Mike Hohnson has been coming up with all sorts of excuses not to seat Representative Grijalva.
When she is seated, she has said she will sign on to the House motion mandating the release of the so-called Epstein files, the documents turned up in the investigation into the sex trafficker and financier Jeffrey Epstein.
She will become the 218th signatory - the magic number needed to pass the measure in the lower House. But that's just another, rather minor story that is being swept along in the raging torrent of political news this week.
But back to the shutdown. The President found money to pay the US military and FBI and other Federal law enforcement this week (like most countries the US can pull a few bob out of the back of the sofa when the need arises).
The other cops are paid by state and local taxes, like firemen. Social welfare money gets paid as a matter of course, pretty much. With the blue, the green and the grey taken care of, the President seems to have lost interest in the budget standoff.
There is no sense of urgency to fix this crisis, no sense that it is a crisis, for some it's an opportunity. Russ Vought, the Trump appointee who is head of the Office of Budget and Management has a plan.
As you would expect from the principal author of Project 2025, the Conservative manifesto for a second Trump presidency, which envisions a large-scale reshaping of the Federal Government. Timelines are being moved up.
But politics moves in cycles. Or waves. In two long times in politics (i.e a fortnight) The sense of urgency to fix the Shutdown may be evident in the White House. November 1 is when open enrollment for health insurance schemes starts, when people can shop around for better deals.
But we have been warned for several weeks now that there wont be any better deals. Only worse ones. Due to the end of Obamacare subsidies in the "One Big Beautiful Bill". The "sticker shock" that is coming in health insurance premiums we are told is going to put the issue of health insurance front and centre in the coming weeks.
Coming months, if the opposition Democratic Party gets their way, hoping it becomes the issue for the midterm elections taking place in a years' time.
But if a week is a long time in politics, a year is ... well, who cares.
This week of weeks started with the Middle East peace deal, tentative and fragile as it is. The President flew to Israel, then on to Egypt where twenty political leaders joined him and ... er, the boss of FIFA, the soccer world cup people, to sign a phase one peace deal between Israel and Hamas (though neither Israel nor Hamas were at the signing ceremony).
Then it was back home, two consecutive overnight flights, to present the Congressional Medal of Honour to the widow of Charlie Kirk, the assassinated Conservative political activist. One of those attending the ceremony in the Rose Garden was the President of Argentina, Javier Millei.
President Trump was keen to help out an ally and fellow Traveller of MAGA - in his case Make Argentina Great Again. The chainsaw wielding President Millei had come to DC to sign off a $20bn currency swap that will keep the Argentine Peso afloat - at least until after midterm election at the end of his month.
But in a land where Federal workers are being sent home without pay, and some are being outright sacked, the news that the Trump administration can find $20bn to bail out a political crony is stoking the outrage.
And not just among Democrat voting civil servants in the DC region who have no pay packet. Farmers, big Republican voters in the heartland, were also outraged to hear of the Argentine bailout. Many farmers are facing a financial waterboarding this year as a result of Trumps tariffs.
In particular soybean farmers, who have one huge market - China. Normally they sell China about Thirteen billion worth of soybeans a year. But this year, in retaliation for the Tariff wars, China has bought zero dollars of soybeans from America. As in North America, the USA bit. The Chinese have instead been shopping in South America - Brazil and Argentina. The same Argentina that is getting a $20 billion bailout from the US.
Meanwhile at the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defence, a former Fox News presenter and National Guard Major introduced new regulations requiring journalists to sign forms undertaking not to disclose any information that has not been authorized. In other words, reports are to be banned from reporting only stories that are worth reporting.
The major news outlets, who have staffed the Pentagon press room for decades, revolted and refused to sign up. On Wednesday they were promptly stripped of their press accreditation, denying them access to the building.
No amount of reminding people that Secretary Hegseth had himself breached all security rules in making an unauthorized disclosure of live operational details of air operations earlier this year, nor that the de-credentialing of journalists was an attack on first amendment rights and American's right to know how their government works seemed to cut through.
This was another otherwise big story that was just washed away by the foamy tide of news flow this week.
But it's yet more undermining of the role of the free press in America, occurring against a background of corporate mergers and takeovers that could soon see the emergence of a new media colossus.
Skydance, a company that has already bought Paramount and its Network TV channel CBS, is bidding for Warner Discovery and its channels, which include new channel CNN, and social media channel Tik Tok in America.
Bankrolling the whole combine is Oracle founder Larry Ellison, another Trump friendly billionaire, whose servers are being lined up to host Tik Tok in America. Ellison was briefly richer than Elon Musk last month.
And there is a genuinely big Pentagon story happening that is not getting the full reporting treatment - the sudden and unexplained resignation of Alvin Holsey, a four star Admiral and head of Southern Command, currently engaged in operations in the Caribbean against alleged drug smuggling boats (and possibly facilitating covert CIA action in Venezuela - acknowledged and authorised by President Trump this week: a remarkable development in itself).
Rumours of tensions between Admiral Holsey and Defence Secretary Hegseth over the conduct and legality of the anti-drug actions abound.
Meanwhile, the IMF and World Bank held their autumn meeting in Washington this week, and barely got any attention. (Some of the delegates were a bit freaked out at the sight of armed soldiers on the streets of DC: I tried to reassure one of them that the guns you need to worry about are the ones you can’t see. I don’t think it worked.)
The IMF said the US economy hasn’t suffered much inflation from tariffs so far, and other countries have re-routed trade to compensate for US restrictions, enabling most of the world to continue to grow global trade. And the US government continues to boast about how much money it is taking in from the import tax. But there were other clouds on the horizon.
The Chinese government announced sharp restrictions on the export of rare earths and other minerals used in high tech manufacturing. And they are not just on American industry – these are worldwide restrictions, a real flexing of global muscle by Beijing. the minster for finance (and President of the Eurogroup) Paschal Donohoe said it was the type of thing that has "the potential to be the kind of economic development that could pose a shock to global economic growth".
As if we hadn’t enough to be worried about.
Another ping on the phone on a Friday night. The Trump administration has hired a lawyer called Kurt Olsen, who worked on efforts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election, with a new brief to investigate that year's election once again, along with voting-related issues. He reports directly to the President.
And the processing of those on the Presidents enemies list continued this week, with Friday’s formal charging of former National Security Adviser John Bolton with mishandling classified information. The information was published in his book, "the room where it happened", about his time in the first Trump administration.
It was very unflattering about the President but was apparently cleared for publication in the usual way for government employees. Bolton has pleaded not guilty to the charges, which are viewed by many lawyers here as being more serious than those brought against former FBI director James Comey and the current Attorney General of the State of New York, Letitia James.
More "enemies" are expected to be charged soon, including former special prosecutor Jack Smith, who investigated and attempted to prosecute Trump for the Justice Department, and California Senator Adam Schiff, who dogged the Presidents first term about alleged collusion with Russia.
And Russia was back on the agenda on Friday, with a White House meeting with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky, being let down gently by the administration's apparent backing away from a plan to supply Ukraine with the highly accurate, long range Tomahawk cruise missile (yes, they have one hanging up in the National Museum of the American Indian here in DC: no you can’t see it because of the Government shutdown).
Ending the Ukraine war is the next big foreign policy challenge for the administration, and Russian President knows it. Trump said on Friday "I’ve been played by the best of them" in business and politics, but he was still winning and intends doing a ninth peace deal this year.
Now let's see how "No Kings Day" goes. The last one, back in June, saw some 2,100 towns and cities hold events to protest against President Trump, drawing crowds estimated by organizers at around 5 million. Broadcasters put the attendance in the millions.
Back in June the protest was the first sign of an organized opposition to the Trump administration. This time the parliamentary opposition has engineered a political crisis to take a stand on, leading to the government shutdown. And there are all the other actions of the administration - and the circumstances it finds itself in - that are roiling the nation.
It's a crude political test. A bigger turnout than June will suggest a growing opposition movement. A smaller turnout sill signal that no matter what he does, Trump can run over the opposition and get away with it.
Either way it will mark another turning point in the evolution of American politics. More long weeks in politics lie ahead.
