Even Richard Nixon never dreamed that his "madman theory" tactic would become the entire playbook for a United States president on any foreign policy issue, but that's where we now find ourselves, apparently. Nobody -- including even his own closest aides -- has any idea what Donald Trump is about to do next. Will he slap a five percent tariff on Mexico next Monday, or is it all just a big bluff to increase his leverage in trade talks? Nobody knows. White House aides say one thing, and the president then contradicts them within hours. Then they say something different, and Trump contradicts that, too. Sometimes Trump seems incredibly determined to levy a new tax on imported Mexican goods no matter what the outcome, and sometimes he seems like it's all just a giant ruse. Welcome to "madman trade theory," in other words.

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What do you do with a president who wants to be impeached? That's a surreal question, but then again we live in surreal times. Donald Trump seems more and more like a man begging the House Democrats to impeach him. It's like every political decision he makes is designed to be so outrageous that it'll surely goad Democrats into starting an impeachment committee.

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You just know it's going to be entertaining when the White House announces an upcoming "Infrastructure Week," because the end result is always a fiery trainwreck of epic proportions. In one of the first instances of this recurring phenomenon, Donald Trump hijacked (there's simply no better word for it) what was supposed to be a press announcement rolling out a plan to reduce regulations to get road projects built faster. With Elaine Chao helplessly looking on from the sidelines, Trump instead let fly his unhinged "very fine people on both sides" rant in response to the racist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia. That was the biggest and most spectacular Trumpian trainwreck during a planned Infrastructure Week, to date. But now we've got President Man-Baby's latest temper tantrum to compare it to. Because Infrastructure Week always means "never a dull moment" in the Trump White House.

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President Donald Trump is stonewalling Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is not convinced that the time has yet come to open impeachment hearings. If this dynamic doesn't change, then the battles over access to Trump, Trump's advisors, and Trump's business records (including his taxes) will likely play out in the federal courts. Trump is convinced that this is either a winning strategy for him, or at the very least a way to stall the entire fight until after next year's election. If either of those are true, he will avoid any negative consequences for his actions at least until he knows whether he's going to get a second term or not. But he may have miscalculated, because his "big stall" tactic may just backfire on him in a big way.

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It's been yet another week of life so bizarre it'd be hard to even imagine it as satirical art. Who would best be able to capture the lunacy and doublethink emanating from Trump's White House? Joseph Heller? George Orwell? Douglas Adams? Or perhaps Dr. Seuss? In other words, just another glorious week in Trumpland, folks.

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What does "co-equal" really mean? That is a basic constitutional question that has never adequately been answered. We are supposed to have three co-equal branches of government in the United States, the legislative (Congress), the executive (the president and all executive branches), and the judicial (the Supreme Court and all other federal courts). Theoretically, none are supposed to be held above the other, hence the co-equal designation. But what does that really mean?

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Jay Inslee, the governor of Washington state, just signed into law the first-ever statewide experiment with a "public option" in heath insurance. This is a momentous event, but so far it hasn't been getting that much attention in the media. Inslee is also a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, so it will now be incumbent upon him to become the champion spokesman for instituting a public option nationwide.

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Donald Trump's trade war with China reached a new level of intensity over the past week, as the trade deal talks all but collapsed -- instead of, as had been promised, leading to an imminent signing ceremony of the best trade deal ever struck in all of history. Trump suddenly announced he was more than doubling the tariff on Chinese goods entering the country, and then for good measure threatened to slap the same 25 percent tariff on everything else China sells in America. This morning, China announced its own retaliatory tariffs on U.S. products, and the stock market sank 600 points. Trump continues in his role as cheerleader for the tariffs, which means Democrats are left to make the case -- once again -- that the emperor's new clothes don't actually exist. So far, they haven't been doing all that great a job in doing so, however.

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Most Fridays, we tend to focus on President Donald Trump's flailings and failings on domestic issues, but this week his buffoonery on the world stage was really what was front and center. Sure, there's an ongoing constitutional crisis between the White House and the House of Representatives, but this week in particular seemed to be "foreign policy mishap week" for Team Trump.

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Those are strong words to use in a subtitle, as well as so dated as to almost be anachronistic. But we feel this is the perfect phrase to sum up Stephen Moore's announcement that he's withdrawing from consideration for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Because apparently Moore has been in a coma since just before Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in a tennis match billed as the "Battle Of The Sexes."

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