Each week the editorial board reflects on a current issue in Our View. The position taken does not reflect the opinions of everyone on the Hilltop Views staff. This week’s editorial board is composed of Viewpoints Editors Lauren Sanchez and Kenny Phipps.

Welcome to another semester on the Hilltop! After a much needed vacation, we at Hilltop Views are back in production for the Fall. To kick off our editorial section’s semester, we decided to take a step back and consider the events of the previous few months, and what a past few months it has been. While not necessarily good for the country, and in many cases quite the opposite, the actions of the Trump administration were low-hanging fruit for our editorial board. We’d like to take a little space here to recap them and catch everyone up to speed.

Quite frankly, it was difficult to keep up with all the news surrounding the tomfoolery of the president this summer. New updates in the investigation of Russian collusion popped up fairly regularly. From reports that Donald Trump Jr. met with a self-declared operative of the Russian state to discuss dirt on Hillary Clinton during the campaign, to a more recent disclosure concerning a Trump employee literally claiming they could build a Trump International Hotel in Moscow and “engineer” the election, there was a lot to digest.

Additionally, Trump sent out a series of tweets intended to change the military’s policy on allowing transgender people to serve their country. Soon after, he shifted the responsibility from himself to Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, a move characteristic of the same coward who had AG Sessions announce the suspension of DACA rather than accept the fallout of his bigoted actions himself.

Who can forget his response to the events in Charlottesville? Not only did Trump fail to condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who were protesting the removal of a confederate statue at the University of Virginia, which culminated in three deaths, but when he finally managed to do it he said there were “fine people” rallying with them. It took him two days to reprimand them, and when he finally did he didn’t even do a good job of it.

Last but certainly not least, there is the ongoing series of provocations between President Trump and Kim-Jong Un of North Korea. For a while there this summer, it seemed as though Trump was stumbling into a nuclear war that we were all powerless to stop. Every president has to learn to kiss up to the North Koreans without starting yet another war in the Pacific, but Trump has taken that learning curve and entirely disregarded it. Missile tests and bombastic language do not necessitate a thermonuclear war, and hopefully neither does Trump’s braggadocio.

In the spirit of fairness, there are a precious few things that the President has done well. He nearly immediately secured about $12 billion to fund relief services for Hurricane Harvey victims and called out several GOP congressmen for their occupational incompetence.

In short, it has been a frightfully eventful summer for the Trump administration. We went from a somewhat tame dumpster fire of an administration to a blazing inferno that just added to the summer heat.