Donald Trump has apparently decided to take the advice of that impressive fount of political wisdom, South Park. It's hard to come to any other conclusion, really, when you recall that one of the songs from their first big movie (a song nominated for an Academy Award, no less) was titled: "Blame Canada." President Trump was obviously inspired by the lyrics: "With all their beady little eyes / And flapping heads so full of lies," when he began his tweetstorm against Justin Trudeau after Trump left the G-7 meeting early.

Satire-becoming-reality aside, though, it's worth pondering exactly what led to this episode in how not to conduct international relations with longtime allies. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that what lies at its heart is a false worldview crashing into the brick wall of reality. And that can be a very dangerous thing.

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As usual, there was a whole lot of political news this week, as President Trump continues to flail his way around the world in multiple unhinged ways. But this week, our eye was caught by the story that the Trump Justice Department has announced it is now conspiring to hand Democrats the midterm elections. Maybe Trump should appoint a special prosecutor to look into or something?

Snark aside, here's what is going on. Traditionally, the Justice Department is charged with defending federal laws in court. Whether the current administration agrees with the laws on the books or not, it's a rule of thumb that they defend them to the hilt in court. Otherwise they'd just be cherry-picking which laws should be followed and which should not.

Which is exactly what the Trump administration is now trying to do. They are refusing to defend specific provisions of Obamacare in court, because they hate it so very, very much. The problem for Republicans is that the two provisions that will now no longer be legally defended are that insurance companies have to offer health insurance to everyone without regard to pre-existing conditions, and that they cannot take pre-existing conditions into account when setting their prices for any individual.

In other words, two of the most popular parts of Obamacare. Even during the whole "repeal and replace" fiasco in Congress last year, Republicans would desperately claim (from the president on down) that the part of Obamacare that dealt with pre-existing conditions would remain for everyone (even when they knew they were flat-out lying). This was because they all knew first-hand that these provisions were wildly popular with the public. And now, five months before the midterm elections, the Trump administration is trying to destroy the pre-existing condition guarantees.

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President Trump is the ultimate off-the-cuff guy. He has no problem just winging it, on just about any subject under the sun. This week alone, Trump falsely accused Canadians of burning down the White House (they didn't, the British did, over 200 years ago) and reportedly flirted with the idea of just pardoning himself to get rid of all the pesky investigations. He's also decided there will be no formal process for any presidential pardons, other than "a celebrity asks me for one for somebody." Hey, it worked for both Sly Stallone and Kim Kardashian, so why not others? Today, two stories appeared which aren't exactly surprising, but still raised a few eyebrows. The first is that Trump has apparently decided that he doesn't really need a whole lot of briefing for his summit meeting with Kim Jong Un, and that all he really needs is the right "attitude." What could possibly go wrong with that plan? We'll see, next Tuesday, one assumes. But the second report was much more detailed, about a briefing supposedly on disaster preparedness that Trump just got from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, because hurricane season has just begun. Someone present recorded the meeting and leaked the recording to the Washington Post and CNN. So far, only excerpts have been released, but it is sincerely to be hoped that a full transcript will eventually become available, so we can all bask in the splendor of a president unchained.

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I suppose, if one were more classically-minded, that slogan should be: "Year Of The Woman II." But whatever you call it, 2018 is shaping up to be even bigger for the fairer sex than 1992, the original Year Of The Woman in American politics. There are two reasons this is probably soon going to become conventional wisdom (if it already hasn't): impressive women candidates, and suburban and minority women as the key voting demographics.

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Eight states are holding primary elections today, making it the biggest election day until November. One-eighth of the entire country lives in California, making it the biggest primary contest for House races by far. But what people will be watching from the California returns isn't so much who will win each district as who will come in second. This is because of California's bizarre "top-two jungle primary," where only the two top vote-getters in the primary advance to the general election ballot no matter which party they are from. This sets up the possibility of voters being presented with two candidates from the same party, which is inherently unfair to all other political parties. But this time around, the campaigning has gotten downright weird, because people are attempting to game the top-two system like never before.

The most blatant and obvious case of this is the astonishing fact that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (House members whose job it is to get other Democrats elected to the House) is now paying to run ads in a House contest -- for a Republican. Yes, you read that right. Donations which were made to a political party for the express purpose of trying to get more members of that party elected to Congress are being spent on ads for someone from the other party. It's hard to find the right words for this astonishing turn of events, but Bernie's "rigged system" comes close. Democrats are attempting to rig the system, because it is such a bizarre system to begin with that it almost invites such rigging.

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Today, the Supreme Court punted. Or, to be more properly seasonal, they ruled that a runner didn't touch second base so they invalidated his home run. The case before them was Masterpiece Cakeshop versus Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a test case that dealt with the limits of the freedom of religion and the state's right to regulate commerce to assure equal treatment under the law for all. However, the ruling did not directly address that weighty constitutional issue, but rather ruled that the state behaved improperly in its decision-making process. They didn't rule on the decision itself, in other words, but rather how it was arrived at. This is the big reason why the ruling was not another 5-4 decision, but rather 7-2. If the high court had ruled on the actual question before them, no matter how they ruled it most probably would have been another close 5-4 split.

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It was another rollicking week in the world of politics, which is admittedly not saying much in the era of Trump. It was revealed this week that the death toll on Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria was not just higher than had been officially reported, but at least seventy times higher, and in fact was more than twice as high as the death toll from Hurricane Katrina. You'd think this would be a gigantic media story, but (sadly) you would be wrong. Just like everything else about the devastation, most certainly including the media's treatment of it, this bombshell report was largely ignored this week. No wonder Puerto Ricans feel like second-class citizens, when they keep getting second-class treatment like this.

There was even a handy "story hook" the media could have used: this year's hurricane season just began. But instead, all anyone wanted to talk about on the news was Roseanne and (later in the week) Samantha Bee. More on all of these stories later, down in the awards section of the column.

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Illinois just became the 37th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Since the necessary constitutional requirement for adopting amendments is ratification by the state legislatures of three-fourths of the total number of states, this would seem to indicate that if only one more state did so, the Equal Rights Amendment would become the Twenty-Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution. But it's not quite that simple.

Women's groups have been trying to get an amendment guaranteeing equality between the sexes under the law since the times of the suffragettes. After several early efforts to do so failed, in 1972 the following amendment was approved by both houses of Congress:

Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

It was thus sent to the states for ratification (the president has no part to play in the amendment process, it's worth pointing out). Initially, it had a deadline of March 22, 1979 -- in other words, if it hadn't been ratified by enough states by that date, it would turn into a pumpkin.

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Representative Trey Gowdy -- not normally known for being a Trump antagonist -- has been publicly debunking the president's new favorite conspiracy theory, in his latest news interviews. This is a somewhat stunning development, and further marginalizes Representative Devin Nunes, who keeps fruitlessly trying to uncover the smoking gun that proves that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other nefarious Democrats somehow entered into a giant plot to use the F.B.I. to further their own political aims. The F.B.I. and the rest of the "Deep State" conspired to put Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office, according to Nunes and the rest of the tinfoil-hat gang. Of course, this conspiracy theory never really gets around to explaining why, if this was the case, the F.B.I. intervened twice to undercut Clinton during the campaign, but never did so for Donald Trump. Recently, Nunes tried again to reveal the supposed truth of his suspicions by forcing a briefing about a confidential F.B.I. informant, initially to just him and Gowdy. Then Nunes would have run to the television cameras with his proof and the entire Bob Mueller investigation would just disappear like the morning dew. Or something. But the bombshell Nunes anticipated turned out to be a dud, once again. And in the past 24 hours, Gowdy has shot the whole "spygate" theory down in flames.

Gowdy, please remember, was in the briefing that was supposed to reveal the smoking gun. But since the briefing, Nunes hasn't uttered a peep about it, leading many to conclude that it was yet another example of the smoking gun being found in Nunes's hand, right after he had used it to shoot himself in the foot. The facts didn't fit his wild theory, therefore he went mum on the whole subject. Gowdy, to his credit (a line I never personally thought I would ever type), stepped up instead.

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The best quip I've heard about the explosive television news today has got to be: "This was the problem all along: Having Roseanne back meant having Roseanne back." In other words, the show was great and funny and all of that, but Roseanne Barr (the actress, not the Roseanne Conner character) had, in the years that intervened between the original run's cancellation and the reboot, completely gone off the rails. She was not just a Trump voter, to put this another way, she was out-Trumping Trump in her support of crazy conspiracy theories. And, yes, some of those crazy conspiracy theories were also pretty racist or (at the start, she later became staunchly pro-Israel) blatantly anti-Semitic.

ABC knew all of this when they agreed to the reboot. You can picture the executives holding their collective breath, waiting to see whether Roseanne Barr could avoid spouting off on Twitter about conspiracies or outright racism. Today, they were forced to exhale, after the flood of tweets proved Roseanne Barr was a risk not worth taking.

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