Not enough attention is being paid to how bad Donald Trump is at politics. Not “leadership,” or “policy,” but the actual game of politics, where you move chess pieces around and pull levers and such to get what you want.
Case in point, yesterday Trump tweeted, out of nowhere, this:
Huh. That’s weird. Just a random plug for a TV show from the leader of the free world. Well, let’s go ahead and see what Judge Jeanine Pirro says on tonight’s show...
Oh. She threw Paul Ryan under the bus. What an odd coincidence.
Here’s Reince Priebus, in that same WaPo article:
On Sunday, during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus called Trump's tweet and Pirro's call for Ryan to step down “coincidental.”
“There is no preplanning here,” Priebus said, adding that Trump promoted Pirro's show on Twitter “because he loves Judge Jeanine” and wanted to do her a favor.
According to the searchable Trump twitter archive, Trump has only tweeted about Judge Jeanine one other time in his life.
What I imagine happened was something like this:
AHCA goes down in flames.
Bannon/Trump/whoever need someone to blame, because it definitely wasn’t the President’s fault, as he spent nearly two and a half weeks working on this and barely went golfing three times.
They decide to blame Ryan. Makes sense.
They strategize. Call around to surrogates. Jeanine says she is down to kneecap Ryan. They say, great, tonight on your show, let Ryan have it, and that will start a slow triangulation, where we slowly put the pressure on, gradually, from different corners of the --
HEY EVERYONE IT’S ME DONALD TRUMP! WATCH JUDGE JEANINE’S SHOW I WONDER WHAT SHE WILL SAY THERE HAS BEEN NO COORDINATION OBVIOUSLY AT ALL I AM JUST A FAN OF HERS AND I FEEL LIKE EVERYONE SHOULD MAYBE CHECK IT OUT BECAUSE WHATEVER SHE SAYS IS USUALLY SMART AND ACCURATE SHE IS SMART EVERYONE WATCH NOW DO IT WATCH HER SHOW
And then the people who are not terrible at politics sigh, very loudly, and grit their teeth, and claim that this was a coincidence.