First, Donald Trump announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum. Then China reacted with $3 billion in tariffs on U.S. goods (mostly farm goods -- fruit, nuts, and pork). Trump hit back with the threat of tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods. The Chinese, not to be outdone, announced that if this happens they'll be slapping their own tariffs on $50 billion in American goods -- most notably, soybeans. Trump then tripled down, announcing further tariffs on $100 billion of Chinese goods. So begins the great Sino-American trade war of 2018. Or, as we like to call it, the Trump trade war. Why not give proper credit where it is due, after all?

The stock market reacted to the latest salvos by dropping over 750 points today. It clawed back some of this at the very end of the day, but it was yet another day of volatility. The markets were down for the whole first quarter of this year, for the first time in a long time. The Trump bump has given way to the Trump slump, in other words. Also, the March jobs report was pretty underwhelming, and wages still have yet to rise for millions of hardworking Americans.

Now, a quick historical quiz: what were Republicans saying just three short months ago about the economy? Back in January, before stocks took their first dive, the GOP was pleased as punch with the gigantic tax cut they had just passed for the wealthy and corporations, and they all were optimistically predicting that the economy would now "be unleashed" and thus soar to new heights. We would all, to use a memorable phrase, soon get tired of all the winning.

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This is going to be a rather strange column for me to write, because it centers on a few subjects that I don't normally write about. In fact, I usually studiously avoid writing about these subjects. But with all the hoo-hah over the reboot of the television sitcom Roseanne, I felt it was time to chime in on popular television culture and my own television viewing preferences. Again, two subjects that I normally strive to avoid, mostly because this just isn't that kind of blog. So if these subjects bore you to death, I'd just stop reading right now. Fair warning.

I have to begin an article about Roseanne with a personal admission. It's been a "guilty pleasure" television show of mine for a while now. I actually completely missed the first-run seasons, as I watched little-to-zero television during the 1980s and 1990s. For most of this time I didn't even own a television set. So I missed Roseanne in its heyday. I still haven't seen a complete episode of Cheers, either, which always seems to astonish people when I admit to it.

But after getting married, I did buy a television. At that point, I started paying attention to late-night television comedians, since a very large slice of the American public gets all its news and politics from such shows. But the shows didn't come on until 11:30, and there wasn't much on just before they aired. So I found myself watching Roseanne reruns.

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Another Wednesday, another Democratic win in a special election to celebrate. That's the way it feels, at any rate, hearing the news from Wisconsin, where a liberal judge beat out an N.R.A.-supported conservative by a 12-point margin (56 percent to 44 percent). This follows on the heels of Conor Lamb's victory in Pennsylvania, and the incredible upset of Doug Jones over Roy Moore in Alabama. Throughout much of last year, special elections got Democrats fired up nationwide, only to fall short when the votes were counted (such as Jon Ossoff's painful loss in Georgia). But since November, this tide seems to have turned. Now Democrats are not just posting big gains but actually winning these elections, many in states and districts where they really should be losing big-time. Wisconsin's was the latest of these, although Wisconsin is admittedly more of a purple state than, say, Alabama.

Republicans, not to put too fine a point on it, are freaking out. As well they should. There's a change in the air, and it's not going to benefit them in the midterms, to state it bluntly. The smarter Republicans realize this and are steeling themselves for the outcome. Mitch McConnell, in a recent interview with a Kentucky newspaper, admitted as much: "This is going to be a challenging election year. We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don't know whether it's going to be a Category 3, 4, or 5." By "a challenging election year," McConnell really means "a challenging election year for Republicans," of course. This is significant, since McConnell's leadership of the Senate is much less at risk than Paul Ryan's continuing as speaker of the House. Democrats have a much steeper hill to climb to win back the Senate, but even McConnell is getting worried, in other words.

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Red-state teachers are currently in open revolt against the failure of conservatives to deliver on their economic promises. Republicans in these states embraced tax cuts because (as they told everyone) this would unleash the economy and prosperity for all would soon follow. What happened instead is the same thing that always happens when supply-side economics is attempted -- falling tax revenues which force massive cuts to what were formerly untouchable parts of the budget. Like education. But the teachers are tired of taking it on the chin and are now fighting back. They're sick of being paid a pittance (compared to teachers in other states), they're sick of the lack of resources for their students (books and classrooms that are falling apart), and they're sick of dodges like four-day weeks which desperately try to paper over the hard, cold fact that if you cut taxes on a massive scale, you will have less money to spend to educate your children.

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President Donald Trump signaled this weekend that the DACA kids (formerly known as DREAMers) will essentially be on their own, because the effort to pass legislation to address their dire situation is now dead. Of course, that's where things stand today -- by tomorrow, or next week, Trump could take a radically different stance which will contradict his hard tone expressed over Easter weekend. After all, he's certainly done so before.

Throughout it all, Trump's one consistency is a laughable attempt to place the blame for the whole mess on Democrats. This is ridiculous, since Trump himself singlehandedly caused this crisis, and Trump himself has consistently played politics with the issue rather than reaching a concrete deal to move forward. Anyone with two eyes can see this, but Trump continues to insist otherwise in a futile attempt to score political points.

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By Trumpian standards, this has been a relatively quiet week. After all, the president only fired a single cabinet secretary, and zero high-ranking aides! Plus, Trump hasn't attacked Stormy Daniels on Twitter even once, after her bombshell interview on 60 Minutes last Sunday. For Trump, this shows some newfound restraint.

Of course, everything is relative. Perhaps Trump is hunkering down in a desperate attempt to convince a high-profile lawyer (or even just any lawyer) to join his shrinking legal team. It would be kind of hard to interview new lawyers when you're making news by publicly and personally attacking Stormy Daniels, for obvious reasons. Trump's legal team these days is down to the bare bones, after one lawyer quit last week and his replacement decided at the very last minute that he had "conflicts" and couldn't accept the job after all. Superlawyer Ted Olson also piled on, in an interview explaining why he wasn't exactly rushing to join the Trump White House:

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Today, we're going to take a trip down the rabbit hole with Schrödinger's (Cheshire?) cat. If that sounds like a mixed-up metaphor, that's because it is. Our fantastical journey starts off as a Charles Dodgson-style syllogism, but since it contains such circular logic it winds up being an Erwin Schrödinger-style thought experiment. Did they or didn't they? Well, until the wave function collapses into a single eigenstate, President Donald Trump's lawyer's lawyer would have us all believe that they both did and didn't, at the same time. The cat is both alive and dead, in other words. While this may be the most obscure and confusing lead paragraph I have ever personally written, such obscurity seems to be almost required these days, to talk about the growing sex scandal (or non-sex scandal) surrounding Trump and porn star Stormy Daniels.

While many have heard of the Schrödinger's cat paradox, only students of pure logic are usually familiar with the work of Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) in the field of syllogisms. Here is a sample, in case you've never seen one before:

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The Trump administration just announced that it will be adding a citizenship question to the main U.S. Census form that all United States residents will be getting in 2020. Already, several states have sued to block this move, since it could obviously lead to undercounting the actual population. The Justice Department is attempting to claim that the data is necessary to uphold voting rights, but it strains credulity to picture Jeff Sessions being suddenly concerned about upholding federal voting laws, given his history on civil rights. The Census Bureau is trying to put itself on the side of the angels as well, insisting that individual data would never be turned over to law enforcement agencies so that undocumented immigrants could be rounded up. But their hands aren't exactly historically clean either, which is why it's tough to make the case that anyone refusing to answer the citizenship question on their Census form is somehow being overly paranoid.

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Rumors are swirling inside the Beltway that Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may not be around for very much longer. If this seems too good to be true for Democrats, well, it's because it likely is -- at least for the time being. But there's more than one way to skin this particular cat. So let's take a look at all the various ways Paul Ryan could exit both his current leadership position and his House seat, just for fun.

Steps down as speaker

This is the mildest of the possibilities. Paul Ryan could decide that while he's had enough of trying to keep his own caucus together and is therefore stepping down as speaker, he still wants to stay in Congress. This is historically rare, since it is a big step down in the power structure. Usually leaders leave Congress altogether rather than be demoted to just one vote out of 435. However, Ryan would likely be given just about any committee chair he expressed interest in by the incoming speaker, out of sheer gratitude. So he'd likely be heading one of the powerful budget committees, which is what he did before he took on the speakership.

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Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School staged an incredibly successful rally in Washington this weekend, as hundreds of thousands of students, parents, teachers, and other concerned citizens marched to demand stricter gun control laws. It was an impressive feat, since in general high school students are not normally expected to organize anything more complicated than the school yearbook or the prom. I personally could not imagine my former self (at that age) joining together with other students to create such a massive event in a little over one month's time. So the students deserve a whole lot of credit for pulling it off in such spectacular fashion. But the biggest question overhanging the success of the march was whether it will actually change anything or not in the politics of gun control legislation.

There is some cause for cautious optimism, although it has to be said that the odds are against the students achieving real and lasting change. The optimistic part comes from something often heard in relation to the students' effort: "This time feels different." The students are leading the charge, which means the gun control effort has been transformed into a youth movement. This is why so many comparisons are being made to the Vietnam era anti-war marches. But will even having literal poster children in charge change anything, in the end? This remains to be seen.

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