Obama Really, Really Wants To See Trump Defeated Next Year

When Glenn Thrush reported that Obama tried talking an increasingly less alert Biden out of jumping into the race for the Democratic nomination fearing his former VP could "damage his legacy," I wondered whose legacy that "his" referred to, Biden's or Obama's. "You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t," Obama told him. Thrush reported that Obama has asked Biden staffers to make sure the gaffe-prone Biden-- who also has trouble sticking to the truth when cornered-- does not "damage his legacy" or "embarrass himself" during the campaign. The staffers have failed miserably and Biden embarrasses himself every time he gets in front of a microphone. Obama has told confidants that he worries that Biden’s top aides are "too old and out of touch with the current political climate." which is also a good description of Biden himself.

In 2008 when Obama was looking for a running mate, he wanted to balance the ticket. "I want somebody with gray in his hair," Thrush reported he told an aide. An old person. Thrush doesn't go into the fact that he also wanted a conservative since Obama wanted to run as a pretend-progressive. And, unmentioned is that a black man might benefit with someone with a very unfriendly record towards minorities and a lot of red with racists. Biden was perfect. A stinking old conservative racist... what more could anyone want-- for VP?

There were two other finalists-- both white conservatives: Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and Indiana Senator Evan Bayh. Neither is as disgusting as Biden but Bayh is very very close.

“You are the pick of my heart, but Joe is the pick of my head,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Kaine after he made his choice, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.

Eleven years later, Mr. Obama’s cautions and calculations have come to roost.

Mr. Obama, standard-bearer of change but conscious of the racial dynamics of his candidacy, was wary of asking voters to digest too much at once. In Mr. Biden, he found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and provide experience he did not possess, but would not maneuver for the presidency from the No. 2 slot.

...[T]he choice of Mr. Biden as a hedge against change has left the demographically and ideologically evolving Democrats profoundly divided as they desperately seek to unseat President Trump. Even as Mr. Biden casts himself as the man to complete and cement the Obama legacy, that legacy has moved to the center of the Democrats’ fractious debate.

While paying homage to Mr. Obama, who remains popular among Democratic voters, many candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, are urging the party to move far beyond his administration’s positions on immigration, criminal justice, health care, the regulation of banks, the environment, income inequality and race, which they now view as timid, conservative or dated.

“You invoke President Obama more than anybody in this campaign. You can’t do it when it’s convenient and then dodge it when it’s not,” Mr. Booker said to Mr. Biden during the most recent Democratic debate.

The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.

Mr. Biden and his advisers initially thought he might be a better fit as Mr. Obama’s secretary of state, and he bridled at the Obama campaign’s attempt to control his every utterance and personnel move. He exploded when campaign researchers began asking questions about the private life of his family, especially his younger son, Hunter.

Mr. Obama, for his part, took a long time to warm to Mr. Biden, and kept him at arms’ length, and on a leash, in the early days. Up until earlier this year, he suggested Mr. Biden would be better off sticking with his vague promise, made during the audition for the vice presidency, that his short-lived 2008 presidential campaign would be his last.

...“It’s an incredible turn of events, when you think about it,” said Mr. Bayh, who retired from the Senate in 2011. “The question then was, ‘Do you happen to fit the moment?’ The question now is, ‘After all these years, can you turn yourself into an independent source of power, as opposed to being just a loyal and faithful wingman?’ Only time will tell.”

Mr. Biden ran for president in 2008 because he thought he could do a better job than anyone else, saw no real downside, and as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to advance a cherished policy idea: a plan for partitioning Iraq into three ethnic enclaves.

“He felt a responsibility to do it,” recalled Ted Kaufman, one of Mr. Biden’s oldest friends and advisers. “He looked around at the potential people who would run, and he concluded, ‘It’s my time to run.’ It wasn’t a complex set of decisions. If he lost, he lost.”

Others in Mr. Biden’s orbit discerned a deeper motive: Here was his final chance to exorcise the humiliating memories of a promising 1988 campaign demolished by reports he had plagiarized speeches.

Mr. Biden drove his 2008 campaign from the lot directly into a pothole. On the eve of its rollout, in January 2007, he told a reporter for the New York Observer that Mr. Obama was “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Mr. Biden did not bother to tell any of his aides that the interview had gone catastrophically wrong.

...Biden managed just 4 percent of the vote in Iowa on the night of Jan. 3, 2008. His communications adviser, Larry Rasky, suggested he soldier on in New Hampshire, and the candidate wavered for a moment. But his sister, Valerie Owens Biden, shot it down, and he dropped out.

Mr. Biden slipped back to the Senate, and seemed at peace. Shortly after dropping out, he approached Mr. Bayh, who had briefly considered running for president, in the Senate gym. “You were a whole hell of a lot smarter than I was!” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Bayh. “I never had a goddamn chance!”

...It was around that time, in February or March, that Mr. Donilon raised the idea of the vice presidency. Mr. Biden, according to two people in his orbit, initially dismissed the idea, saying he had no interest in being anyone’s “second banana.”

“It wasn’t that easy for him to move on,” said Terrell McSweeny, a longtime Biden policy adviser. Still, “he was starting to ask himself, ‘What can I do that will make the biggest difference for my country?’”

Mr. Biden did not dissuade his people from exploring the opportunity.

By the summer, Mr. Obama’s two top strategists, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, had Mr. Biden at the top of their list. The choice was not just about politics and optics. Mr. Obama, confident to the point of cockiness about his political chops, was privately expressing anxiety about his ability to govern-- conceding that Mrs. Clinton, his chief rival for the nomination, had made valid points about his inexperience.

“He needed somebody in the Situation Room, and somebody who would deal with Mitch so he wouldn’t have to,” said Mr. Axelrod, referring to Mitch McConnell, the combative Senate Republican leader.

Mr. Biden’s relationship with Mr. McConnell would come with its own complications. In late 2012, Mr. Obama tapped his vice president to negotiate one-on-one with Mr. McConnell what was known as the “fiscal cliff,” a budget-cutting deal.

It produced one previously unreported incident that left White House and Senate staff scratching their heads: During a follow-up meeting in the Oval Office in early 2013, Mr. McConnell ruled out a big deal before the 2014 midterms, when he would be running for re-election in Kentucky. Mr. Biden responded by saying, “Mitch, we want to see you come back,” an off-the-cuff endorsement of one of their biggest adversaries.

“That was Joe Biden being Joe Biden,” said Harry Reid, then the Senate Democratic leader, who was in the room, adding that it was an attempt to put Mr. McConnell at ease.

One of the first decisions Mr. Obama’s search team made was to exclude Mrs. Clinton from consideration, despite a tepid public claim that she was in the running. The protracted primary fight had simply been too bitter, and the president would soon offer her the State Department, to put her near, but not so very near, the seat of power.

The extended list of hopefuls included Ohio’s governor, Ted Strickland; a moderate Texas congressman, Chet Edwards; and Mark Warner, a former governor of Virginia who was running for Senate that year. Kathleen Sebelius, the progressive governor of Kansas, was added later to compensate for the gender imbalance. In the end, however, it came down to Mr. Biden and two men who would have represented generational change: Mr. Bayh, then 52, and Mr. Kaine, 50.

It was indicative of Mr. Obama’s unsentimental approach that his personal favorite, Mr. Kaine, finished third. The nominee viewed him as too young and too unschooled in foreign affairs to help him in the campaign or White House. Mr. Obama was also deeply worried about a backlash against a black man at the top of the ticket, and believed that an older white running mate would ease fears in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Indiana that he had lost in the primaries.

“Barack Hussein Obama is change enough for most people,” Mr. Obama said of passing over Mr. Kaine, according to Mr. Axelrod.

In late July, Mr. Plouffe and Mr. Axelrod embarked on a one-day trip from the campaign’s Chicago headquarters to audition all three, starting with Mr. Biden in Delaware.

“Basically I said, ‘Forgive me for being so blunt, but how do we know you know how to shut up?’” Mr. Axelrod recalled asking. “An hour later, he finished answering. So I asked him another question.”

[Joe Biden has a long history of verbal flubs and gaffes. And he knows it.]

Mr. Biden was candid about his struggle to maintain verbal discipline, and he repeatedly interrupted himself to ask, “Am I making sense?” But the quantity of his advice was offset by its quality. Mr. Obama’s political magi were especially impressed with his insights into the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain.

...Obama agreed that Mr. Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Mr. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Mr. Biden said, according to Mr. Kaufman.

At some point, Mr. Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Mr. Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.

Mr. Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Mr. Plouffe said.

Before parting, Mr. Obama popped a surprise, intended to test Mr. Biden’s commitment to being a wingman: “Would you prefer being secretary of state to vice president?” he asked.

Mr. Biden chose the latter. Mr. Obama formally offered him the job after he flew back to Washington. Neither man has ever spoken publicly about exactly what was said, but one Biden aide who was watching the little red switchboard light for the senator’s private line said it stayed on too long for it to have simply been a perfunctory call of congratulations.

...Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Mr. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Mr. Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Mr. Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fund-raising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.

In 2016, Mr. Obama quietly pressured Mr. Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Mrs. Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Mr. Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.

By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.

The two men spoke at least a half dozen times before Mr. Biden decided to run, and Mr. Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.

“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Mr. Obama told Mr. Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

Mr. Biden-- who thinks he could have defeated Donald Trump four years ago-- responded by telling Mr. Obama he could never forgive himself if he turned down a second shot at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Obama has said he will not make an endorsement in the primary, and has offered every candidate his counsel. But he has taken an active interest in the inner workings of his friend’s campaign, to an extent beyond anything offered to other candidates.

In his interactions with Mr. Biden-- the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month-- Mr. Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.

He has communicated his frustration that Mr. Biden’s closest advisers are too old and out of touch with the current political climate-- urging him to include more younger aides, according to three Democrats with direct knowledge of the discussion.

In March, Mr. Obama took the unusual step of summoning Mr. Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Mr. Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.

When they were done, Mr. Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:

Win or lose, they needed to make sure Mr. Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.

Obama will be an enthusiastic campaigner against Trump and for whichever Democrat wins the nomination-- even Elizabeth Warren or Bernie, even if Obama is generally from the neoliberal wing of the party and Bernie certainly not. I want to recommend people read Matt Taibbi's new Rolling Stone essay, Media Companies Run By The Country’s Richest People Can’t Help But Project The Mindset Of Their Owners. "The news media is now loathed in the same way banks, tobacco companies, and health insurance companies are, and it refuses to understand this. Mistakes like WMDs are a problem, but the media’s biggest issue is exactly its bubble-ness, and clubby inability to respond to criticism in any way except to denounce it as misinformation and error. Equating all criticism of media with Trumpism is pouring gasoline on the fire. The public is not stupid. It sees that companies like CNN and NBC are billion-dollar properties, pushing shows anchored by big-city millionaires. A Vanderbilt like Anderson Cooper or a half-wit legacy pledge like Chris Cuomo shoveling coal for Comcast, Amazon, AT&T, or Rupert Murdoch is the standard setup."

This is why the White House Correspondents’ dinner is increasingly seen as an unfunny obscenity. The national press at the upper levels really is a black-tie party for bourgeois stiffs who weren’t smart enough for med school, and make their living repeating each other’s ideas and using Trump to sell Cadillacs and BMWs. Michelle Wolf was on the money when she ripped us for only covering “like three topics”:

Every hour it’s Trump, Russia, Hillary, and a panel of four people who remind you why you don’t go home for Thanksgiving… You guys are obsessed with Trump… He couldn’t sell steaks, vodka, water, college, ties or Eric. [But] he has helped you sell your papers, books, and TV. 

...Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward “elites” to his side. The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters. The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last.

The Trumpy-The-Clown Comedy Hour Returns To Prime Time TV

Republican commentator David Frum was busy on Twitter this weekend: "The White House has a communications problem: it doesn’t tell the truth. The way to fix the problem is not to hire more skillful liars. However, a communications strategy based on telling the truth is not practical when the truth is more lethal even than an exposed lie." According to the latest polling about two-thirds of Americans don't believe Trump's gaslighting or any of his bullshit. His spokespeople, Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway and that sociopathic daughter of Mike Huckabee's, are all laughing stocks who are widely considered entertainment figures, not sources of worthwhile information. After just 4 months in the White House Trump is talking about going dark. He told Fox's fake TV judge that he thinks it's a "good idea" to not have press conferences, unless he does them himself every two weeks.



Over the weekend, the Associated Press reported that Trump is mistrustful of his staff, frustrated and increasingly isolated. He sounds like Nixon weeks before he was forced to resign. Trump doesn't trust anyone but Ivanka and her moron husband plus Uday and Qusay and his longtime bodyguard. Julie Pace explained that just 4 months in and Señor Trumpanzee "has become distrustful of some of his White House staff, heavily reliant on a handful of family members and longtime aides, and furious that the White House’s attempts to quell the firestorm over the FBI and congressional Russia investigations only seem to add more fuel." It all came to a head this week when he went rogue and fired Comey without any kind of White House consensus-- or preparation. His communications staffers found out an hour before they had to try to justify the outlandish move and his chief strategist found out the same way Comey did-- on a random TV screen.

When the White House’s defense of the move failed to meet his ever-changing expectations, Trump tried to take over himself. But he wound up creating new headaches for the White House, including with an apparent threat to Comey.

“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump wrote on Twitter Friday morning.

For a White House accustomed to bouts of chaos, Trump’s handling of Comey’s firing could have serious and long-lasting implications. Already Trump’s decision appears to have emboldened the Senate intelligence committee investigating into Russia’s election interference and the president’s associates, with lawmakers announcing a subpoena for former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey’s allies also quickly made clear they would defend him against attacks from Trump, including disputing the president’s assertion that Comey told Trump he was not personally under investigation.

Several people close to the president say his reliance on a small cadre of advisers as he mulled firing Comey reflects his broader distrust of many of his own staffers. He leans heavily on daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Hope Hicks, his trusted campaign spokeswoman and Keith Schiller, his longtime bodyguard. Schiller was among those Trump consulted about Comey and was tapped by the president to deliver a letter informing the director of his firing.

Trump confidants say Bannon has been marginalized on major decisions, including Comey’s firing, after clashing with Kushner. And while Trump praised chief of staff Reince Priebus after the House passed a health care bill last week, associates say the president has continued to raise occasional questions about Priebus’ leadership in the West Wing. Still, Priebus was among the tight circle of staffers Trump consulted about Comey’s firing.

Trump spent most of the week out of sight, a marked change from a typically jam-packed schedule that often includes multiple on-camera events per day. Even when aides moved ahead on an executive order creating a voter fraud commission-- a presidential pet project that some advisers thought they had successfully shelved-- Trump signed the directive in private.

More than a lack of momentum on major policy goals, Trump is said to be seething over the flood of leaks pouring out of the White House and into news reports. He’s viewed even senior advisers suspiciously, including Bannon and Priebus, when stories about internal White House drama land in the press.

A dozen White House officials and others close to Trump detailed the president’s decision-making and his mood on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss private conversations and deliberations.

After Trump decided to fire Comey, he was told by aides that Democrats would likely react positively to the news given the role many believe Comey played in Hillary Clinton’s defeat last year. When the opposite occurred, Trump grew incensed-- both at Democrats and his own communications staff for not quickly lining up more Republicans to defend him on television.

Much of Trump’s ire has been focused on the communications team, all of whom were caught off guard by Comey’s ouster. He increasingly sees himself as the White House’s only effective spokesperson, according to multiple people who have spoken with him. By week’s end, he was musing about cutting back on the White House’s televised press briefings.

Two White House officials said some of Trump’s frustration centers on what he views as unfair coverage of his decisions and overly harsh criticism of press secretary Sean Spicer, as well as deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders, who led much of the response to Comey’s firing. Aides said Trump does not believe his team gave contradictory stories about his decision to fire Comey, despite the fact that the White House’s explanation changed dramatically over a 48-hour period.

Trump is mulling expanding the communications team and has eyed hiring producers from Fox News, according to one White House official.

White House officials had hoped last week’s House vote would give the president a much-needed burst of momentum and infuse new energy into efforts to fully overhaul the “Obamacare” health law and pass a massive tax reform package. Aides were also eager for Trump’s first foreign trip, a high-stakes blitz through the Middle East and Europe.

But the blowback from Comey’s firing left the White House reeling once again. Trump’s visible anger and erratic tweets prompted a reporter to ask Spicer on Friday if the president was “out of control.”

“That’s, frankly, offensive,” Spicer said.

As NY Times ace reporters on the Trump beat explained over the weekend, working for Trump always means looking like a liar or a fool. I've also mentioned that eventually it will make them all (look like) traitors to the United States. Señor Trumpanzee, they wrote, "has never shown any reluctance to sacrifice a surrogate to serve a short-term political need, so he apparently did not think twice this week about exposing a series of staff members to ridicule as he repeatedly shifted his explanation for firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director... [He's] more in need of effective spokesmen than ever, and aides say he is considering a broad shake-up of his team. But his career-long habit of viewing his public protectors as somewhat disposable, on vivid display after Mr. Comey’s sudden ouster, has not exactly been an incentive to step into the firing line on his behalf." Certainly Giuliani, Lewandowski and Christie could all attest to the fact that loyalty for Trump is a strictly one-way street.

“Trump is putting a lot on the backs of his spokespeople, while simultaneously cutting their legs out from underneath them,” said Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and a former adviser to Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida. “There is nothing more discouraging or embarrassing for a spokesman than to have your boss contradict you. In political communications, you’re only as good as your credibility.”

The view that the communications dysfunction begins at the top of the White House organizational chart is bipartisan.

“The most hazardous duty in Washington these days is that of Trump surrogate because the president constantly undercuts the statements of his own people,” said David Axelrod, a communications and messaging adviser to President Barack Obama.

“You wind up looking like a liar or a fool, neither of which is particularly attractive.”

...[T]he president’s mood, according to people close to him, alternates between grim frustration with Washington and his news coverage, and a belief that his own political capital is regenerative. Mr. Trump saw that running against strong headwinds in the campaign worked for him, and he has frequently reverted to that playbook.

On Friday, Mr. Trump unleashed a barrage of bellicose Twitter posts on the Comey firing, but the first had a whisper of contrition, a backhanded admission that he had sent his team out to defend him with flawed, inaccurate and easily debunked information.

“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” he wrote early Friday.

In private, however, Mr. Trump was not in a mea culpa mood. He was still raging over what he viewed as Mr. Comey’s “witch hunt” against him-- and blaming the bipartisan condemnation of his action on the failures of his embattled and overworked communications team.

Mr. Trump is growing increasingly dissatisfied with the performance of his chief of staff, Reince Priebus; the communications director, Michael Dubke; and Mr. Spicer, a Priebus ally, according to a half-dozen West Wing officials who said the president was considering the most far-reaching shake-up of his already tumultuous term.

He has been especially critical of Mr. Spicer, they said, openly musing about replacing him and telling people in his circle that he kept his own press secretary out of the loop in dismissing Mr. Comey until the last possible moment because he feared that the communications staff would leak the news.

Mr. Spicer’s blustery style mimics Mr. Trump’s, but people close to both men said he has not developed an especially close relationship with the president and has failed to use the self-protective tools that savvier Trump aides have adopted.

That seems to be changing. On Friday, Mr. Spicer prefaced much of what he said at the daily briefing with, “The president’s statement.” And while Mr. Trump has raised the Fox News host Kimberly Guilfoyle to allies as a possible press secretary, he has spent several hours with Mr. Spicer this week, praising his television “ratings” during the briefings.

Those who have managed to stay in Mr. Trump’s orbit over a period of time have developed unique adaptation skills.

Campaign aides learned not to lean too much on his accounts of events, steering away from unequivocal public pronouncements unless they could point to his words.

Mr. Trump’s four-decade career in real estate, casinos and entertainment has given him a sense, associates say, that a tacit agreement exists between him and the people who work for him: In exchange for the wealth, fame and power he conveys to them, they agree to absorb incoming fire directed at him.

“With Mr. Trump, it’s pretty simple: Once he makes up his mind on something, that’s it,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump political adviser who remains close to the president’s team.

“You either work for him” or quit, Mr. Nunberg added.

Or hide under the bed... or in the bushes.



This morning, Mike Allen asserted at Axios that Trump is angry at everyone on Team Trump and mulling a shake-up in an upcoming episode. The idea would include going the boot to Reince Priebus, Bannon, Don McGahn and Spicy Spice.

"The advice he's getting is to go big-- that he has nothing to lose," the confidant said. "The question now is how big and how bold. I'm not sure he knows the answer to that yet."

If Trump follows through, his innermost White House circle would shrink from a loop to a straight line of mid-30s family members with scant governing experience: Jared and Ivanka. So while the fighting and leaking might ease, the problems may not because it's the president, not the staff, calling the shots.

One note of caution: Trump often talks about firing people when things go south and does not follow through on it. So it's possible these conversations are his way of venting, and seeking reassurance.

And it all could take a while: Trump heads out on his first international trip at the end of the week. Also, there's an internal argument for minimizing drama by cutting people out of the information flow rather than firing them. So the existing structure may get "one more college try," a trusted adviser said.

Friends say that if Trump goes with a grand shakeup, his implicit message would be: "I get it. I'm moving on. I get that I can do a better job." A top aide added: "He's never going to say he did a bad job."

The sources say Trump feels ill-served by not just his staff but also by several of his Cabinet officials. Trump has two complaints about Cabinet members: Either they're tooting their own horns too much, or they're insufficiently effusive in praising him as a brilliant diplomat, etc. Among the cross-currents:

• His friend Wilbur Ross at Commerce this week took what was perceived as a victory lap on a China trade announcement that does little new in actuality.
• Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a big announcement about increasing prison sentences, at the same time that Jared is working on criminal-justice reform.
• HHS Secretary Tom Price shares the blame for the glacial pace of health-care legislation.

No Cabinet member is expected to go this soon, but a West Wing shuffle looks likely. One obstacle to recruiting new top aides is finding people who would have real clout with a president not prone to enforced order.

So Will It Be Trumpy-the-Clown, Christie And Schumer Running The Show Together In DC?

This morning Trumpanzee tweeted to his 27 million followers to watch so-called "Judge" Jeanine on Fox tonight at 9pm. At exactly 9pm, she came on and what did she say? "Paul Ryan needs to step down. The reason? He failed to deliver the votes on his health care bill... The one that he had seven years to work on... The one that had to be pulled to prevent the embarrassment of not having enough votes to pass... I want to be clear. This is not on President Trump. No one expected a business man to completely understand the nuances, the complicated ins and outs of Washington and its legislative process." So... it's on!

Let's see... Trump is mad at Kushner-in-law for going away to ski instead of holding his hand in the White House while TrumpCare sank ignominiously. And Bannon seems to have persuaded Señor Trumpanzee to settle on making Priebus-- anyone heard from him lately?-- the scapegoat for the catastrophe... as close to Ryan as he dared get. Do those two factors that lead to the tarnished and seemingly discarded Chris Christie becoming the new chief-of-staff? Gee... and right when Flynn flips and becomes an FBI witness for the prosecution? Or is that still just the hottest rumor in town? Let's start with this afternoon's report from behind the lines in the Republican civil war from Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman at the NY Times. They pose some questions I'll paraphrase-- Like every other Republican leader who has tried to rule a fissured and fractious party, does the crazy and disoriented Señor Trumpanzee go for retrenchment or for realignment? Does he cede power to the anti-establishment wing of his party (the Freedom Caucus)? Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats he has improbably blamed for his party’s shortcomings? After all, said Tom Cole (R-OK), a Trump and Ryan loyalist, "The president is a deal maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats."

Trump is not there yet. So far he is operating from the standard-issue Republican playbook. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican support to pass spending bills, an as-yet unformed tax overhaul and a $1 trillion infrastructure package.

On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White House residence to grieve and assign blame. He asked his advisers repeatedly: Whose fault was this?

Increasingly, that blame has fallen on Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, who coordinated the initial legislative strategy on the health care repeal with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, his close friend and a fellow Wisconsin native, according to three people briefed on the president’s recent discussions.

Mr. Trump, an image-obsessed developer with a lifelong indifference toward the mechanics of governance, made a game effort of negotiating with members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, even if it seemed to some members of that group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, that he did not have the greatest grasp of health care policy or legislative procedure.

...Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions, described what happened as a flat-out failure that could inflict serious damage on this presidency-- even if Mr. Bannon believes Congress, not Mr. Trump, deserves much of the blame.

Mr. Bannon and the president’s more soft-spoken legislative affairs director, Marc Short, pushed Mr. Trump hard to insist on a public vote, as a way to identify, shame and pressure “no” voters who were killing their last, best chance to unravel the health care law.

One Hill Republican aide who was involved in the last-minute negotiations said Mr. Bannon and Mr. Short were seeking to compile an enemies list. But Mr. Ryan repeatedly counseled the president to avoid seeking vengeance-- at least until he has passed spending bills and a debt-ceiling increase needed to keep the government running.

Mr. Trump, bowing to the same power-sharing realities that the besieged Mr. Ryan must cope with in leading the fractured Republican majority in the House, decided to back down. But the president’s advisers worry about the hard reality going forward-- the developer with the tough-guy veneer was steamrollered by various factions in the Republican Congress.

The president and his team lamented outsourcing so much of the early bill drafting to Mr. Ryan, and one aide compared their predicament to a developer who has staked everything on obtaining a property without conducting a thorough inspection.

...Kushner, who returned on Friday from a family skiing trip to Aspen, Colo., had said for weeks that he thought supporting the bill was a mistake, according to two people who spoke with him. The president, according to two Republicans close to the White House, expressed annoyance that Mr. Kushner, who has described himself as a first-among-equals adviser, was not on site during the consequential week of wrangling. And Tom Price, who left Congress to become Mr. Trump’s health and human services secretary, was singled out for blame for the bill’s failure.

Mr. Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, took on a bigger role pushing the bill, telling his former colleagues that the president wanted an up-or-down vote on Friday.

After it was all over, the president dutifully blamed the Democrats, a party out of power and largely leaderless, after turning his back on their offers to negotiate on a bipartisan package that would have addressed shortcomings in the Affordable Care Act while preserving its core protections for poor and working-class patients.

Several aides advised him the argument was nonsensical, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.

For Mr. Trump’s Republican opponents, here was poetic revenge served cold. As a candidate in 2016, he initially scoffed at signing a Republican loyalty pledge, at times behaving more like an independent invading the Republican host organism than a normal presidential candidate.

As president, Mr. Trump has left dozens of critical administration jobs unfilled, rejecting stalwart Republican applicants deemed insufficiently loyal to him-- and now he is decrying the disloyalty of the 20 to 30 conservative members who outmaneuvered and overpowered him on health care.

“We all learned a lot-- we learned a lot about loyalty,” a solemn Mr. Trump told reporters late Friday.

He's learned a lot? At this rate his impeachment trial will have ended and his treason trial will have begun before he would have learned enough to qualify as a real president, albeit way too late. Too bad.