I keep hearing reports that Donald Trump doesn’t actually like to fire people, and maybe he just prefers to make them so miserable that they’ll quit on their own. That certainly seems to be the route he chose with his press secretary Sean Spicer and the one he’s pursuing with Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And it may be how he’s dealing with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, too.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is growing increasingly frustrated with the Trump administration and could quit before the year is through, according to reports.

Two sources familiar with Tillerson’s conversations with friends told CNN over the weekend that he has grown so frustrated with President Donald Trump and his administration that there may soon be a “Rexit.”

The change in Tillerson’s tone followed a stressful week for the secretary of state. He was found to have violated U.S. sanctions against Russia while working as CEO of Exxon Mobil. Also, Trump publicly assailed one of Tillerson’s fellow Cabinet members, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, saying he regretted hiring him.

Tillerson, the sources said, viewed Trump’s comments as unprofessional.

Early Monday, Trump again attacked Sessions on Twitter, calling him “beleaguered” and wondering aloud why he wasn’t investigating Trump’s campaign rival Hillary Clinton.

Before last week, Tillerson had strongly maintained he would see through his task of reorganizing the entire State Department after Trump’s March budget proposal laid out plans to cut $10 billion from its roughly $47 billion in funding. But that resolve seems to have dimmed.

Of course, it’s possible that Trump isn’t intentionally making people want to quit, although that seems especially unlikely in the case of Sessions. In Tillerson’s case, it could just be a clash of personalities and management styles. Yet, it’s notable that the Treasury Department just singled out Tillerson for violating the sanctions against Russia while he was serving as the CEO of ExxonMobil. I mean, you don’t see stuff like this everyday:

Two of President Trump’s most senior cabinet members became embroiled Thursday in an unusual legal battle over whether ExxonMobil under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s leadership violated U.S. sanctions against Russia.

Treasury officials fined ExxonMobil $2 million Thursday morning for signing eight business agreements in 2014 with Igor Sechin, the chief executive of Rosneft, an energy giant partially owned by the Russian government. The business agreements came less than a month after the United States banned companies from doing business with him.

Hours after the fine was announced, Exxon filed a legal complaint against the Treasury Department — naming Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin as the lead defendant — while calling the actions “unlawful” and “fundamentally unfair.”

You might remember Igor Sechin as the man that Carter Page allegedly met with in Moscow. I wrote about that saga back in January in a piece called: Mnuchin Needs to Explain the 19.5% Sale of Rosneft. Here’s a refresher on what was said about the Rosneft deal in the Steele Dossier.

Why did Mnuchin go after Tillerson? Did he get a sign off on his attack from Trump? Did he freelance? Was he sending a message?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it’s all screwed up beyond recognition.

What’s clear is that Tillerson is genuinely unhappy, and he’s been unhappy since long before Sessions became Trump’s punching boy:

Last month, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner was the one calling Tillerson “unprofessional.” The secretary of state reportedly blew up at top Trump administration staffers during a meeting in White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus’s office.

Four people familiar with the details of the meeting described the heated exchange to Politico. During his tirade, Tillerson quarreled with the director of presidential personnel, Johnny DeStefano, and made clear he didn’t want the White House to “have any role in staffing.”

Tillerson has been frustrated after Trump and the White House rejected a number of his hiring decisions.

It sounds like Tillerson has one foot out the door, but it’s hard to say for sure if he’s leaving voluntarily or being pushed out.

Losing his press secretary, Attorney General and Secretary of State in rapid succession would make for an interesting communications challenge. I wonder if Trump’s new communications director Anthony Scaramucci has anything better than beauty tips to offer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who will supposedly be back on camera in her new role as Spicer’s permanent replacement.

The Washington Examiner has a lengthy profile of House Freedom Caucus leader Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina. The piece is interesting on several levels, but there’s one thing in there that I’d like to highlight:

After the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape was leaked to the press, setting off scandalized and electorally dangerous discussion about Trump’s treatment of women, Republicans of many stripes, especially those facing tough re-election battles, abandoned Trump. But Meadows and his wife stayed on board, literally and figuratively. Debbie Meadows boarded a “Women for Trump” bus with 10 other wives of congressmen, and defended the candidate. Trump and the White House have not forgotten this, and are unlikely ever to do so.

“We will always remember how tenacious and loyal Mark and Debbie Meadows were, especially after Oct. 7. They’re definitely members of what we call the ‘Oct. 8th coalition,'” said Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, in an interview.

“In the final month, beginning with her boarding that bus … in the face of a great deal of pressure to do otherwise — tells you something about their tenacity and loyalty,” Conway added.

Now, that’s an interesting test. On the Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump boasted of propositioning a married woman while he was himself married to his current wife. He also boasted of making frequent unwanted physical advances on women and the fact that he could get away with it because of his fame and wealth. Many if not most people took this to be an admission that Trump regularly commits sexual assault. And, in fact, in the days after the tape was released, women came out of the woodwork to declare openly that they had been the victims of precisely this kind of sexual assault at the hands of Donald Trump.

It was too much for Paul Ryan who held a teleconference with Republican members of the House and declared that “I am not going to defend Donald Trump. Not now, not in the future,” and that they should all just fend for themselves.

You might think that Team Trump would be a little forgiving of folks were weren’t willing to defend what Trump said on that tape, but you’d be very wrong. They actually have a list of folks who didn’t abandon them that they call “the October 8th coalition.”

I wonder if Melania Trump is a member.

I dutifully sat down this morning and read Jared Kushner’s prepared statement for Congress. I was impressed with the quality and clarity of his defense. He has some good lawyers and I believe he is following their advice unlike his father-in-law. However, there are still some troubling things to discuss.

One of them involves a now infamous speech that Donald Trump gave at the Mayflower Hotel in April 2016. From Kushner’s statement we learn the surprising fact that he’s taking full responsibility for the idea behind doing that speech, as well as much of the organizing work that went into it. Here’s the relevant part in its full context:

With respect to my contacts with Russia or Russian representatives during the campaign, there were hardly any. The first that I can recall was at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. in April 2016. This was when then candidate Trump was delivering a major foreign policy speech. Doing the event and speech had been my idea, and I oversaw its execution. I arrived at the hotel early to make sure all logistics were in order. After that, I stopped into the reception to thank the host of the event, Dimitri Simes, the publisher of the bi-monthly foreign policy magazine, The National Interest, who had done a great job putting everything together. Mr. Simes and his group had created the guest list and extended the invitations for the event. He introduced me to several guests, among them four ambassadors, including Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. With all the ambassadors, including Mr. Kislyak, we shook hands, exchanged brief pleasantries and I thanked them for attending the event and said I hoped they would like candidate Trump’s speech and his ideas for a fresh approach to America’s foreign policy. The ambassadors also expressed interest in creating a positive relationship should we win the election. Each exchange lasted less than a minute; some gave me their business cards and invited me to lunch at their embassies. I never took them up on any of these invitations and that was the extent of the interactions.

What makes this so interesting is that everyone in Washington DC who closely follows the Russians’ lobbying efforts assumed that the idea behind it came from Paul Manafort. For example, James Kirchick wrote at the time of the speech that it was all Manafort’s doing:

Trump’s speech — introduced by Zalmay Khalilzad, a former Bush administration ambassador to the United Nations, Afghanistan and Iraq and about as establishment a figure as one finds in the Republican foreign policy firmament — represents the latest phase of a makeover strategy implemented by Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican aide whom Trump hired last month to professionalize his improvisational, unwieldy campaign…

…That Trump would choose the Center for the National Interest as the place to premier his new seriousness on foreign policy has Manafort’s fingerprints all over it. For Manafort and the Center have something very important in common: both have ties to the Russian regime of President Vladimir Putin, (whose ambassador to the United States sat in the front row for Trump’s address).

Insofar as anyone besides Manafort was deemed responsible for doing this speech under the auspices of a Putin mouthpiece, it was a man named Richard Burt whose name has largely disappeared from discusses about possible coordination:

Another association connecting Trump to the Center is Richard Burt, chairman of the National Interest’s advisory council, and a former ambassador to Germany and State Department official during the Reagan administration. According to a knowledgeable source, Burt, who had previously worked as an unpaid advisor to former Republican presidential candidate Rand Paul, has been enlisted by Manafort to join Trump’s campaign and helped draft his speech (neither Burt nor Manafort responded to inquiries). Burt sits on the senior advisory board of the Russian Alfa Bank.

It’s strange to think that Kushner might have been the person who decided to go to the Center for the National Interest as the host for Trump’s first major foreign policy address. Why would he even know a person like Dmitri Simes?

This cast of characters was originally associated with the campaign of Rand Paul which fizzled out badly, but they seem to have attached themselves to Trump’s campaign as a group last April. Mr. Simes and Mr. Burt were named as a foreign policy advisers to Paul’s campaign, which was controversial in foreign policy circles at the time because Simes is well-known to be extraordinarily close to Vladimir Putin.

Simes’ views and connections are widely known in Russia policy circles. Last September, days after Vladimir Putin published a column in the New York Times denouncing American exceptionalism, Simes joined the Russian president on stage at the Valdai International Discussion Club forum in Russia for a televised panel discussion.

Flanked by three other panelists—Germany’s former defense minister and France and Italy’s former prime ministers—Simes seemed out of place at the high-ranking, Kremlin-sponsored forum.

“No one directly addresses Putin at Dimitri Simes’ level,” noted one Washington-based Russia policy expert. “It just doesn’t happen.”

Putin, in good spirits from his recent success at preventing U.S. military action against the Syrian regime, chatted with Simes about U.S. and Russia policy and quizzed his “American friend and colleague” about the U.S. budget deficit.

“I fully support President Putin’s tough stance [on Syria],” said Simes, according to the transcript released by the Kremlin.

“Not because I’m not an American patriot, but because I believe that baby talk among great powers is not the way to reach an agreement. One has to understand what to expect from the other country, and what their mettle is.”

He hoped recent events would “open up a real opportunity for Russian-American relations.”

The appearance with Putin “set off a lot of internal alarm bells with Russian experts,” said one Russia policy specialist.

“You don’t get onstage with Putin, and sit onstage with Putin, and ask him questions in public, unless everything has been greased and unless you’re not gonna do anything that detracts from the message.”

Simes has been dogged throughout his career by allegations that his work and his organizations have a pro-Kremlin slant.

I may report more extensively in the future about Russia’s influence over the Center for the National Interest and another think tank that the Kremlin directly funds named the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation that was “formed in New York in 2008 under Putin adviser Andranik Migranyan.” Ironically, it was a WikiLeaks disclosure that revealed that Mr. Migranyan had been personally appointed as head of the New York think tank by Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.

Here’s a taste of how that looks:

Today, the Center for the National Interest often partners with the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation.

“The Center for the National Interest periodically arranges events with the Institute for Democracy and Cooperation as we have done with a number of other organizations in Russia across Russia’s political spectrum,” said Saunders. “These events have always included individuals with differing perspectives who often disagree with one another during the discussion.”

Migranyan was selected to run the IDC by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, according to a confidential State Department cable released by WikiLeaks.

“Further boosting Migranyan’s candidacy is his well-known loyalty to the Kremlin and, especially, Putin and Medvedev, whom he describes as ‘democrats’ who support a liberal economic regime,” said the cable.

Migranyan has often been given a platform both by the Center for the National Interest and in the National Interest.

Last May, the IDC and the Center for the National Interest held a joint press conference during which Migranyan defended Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

In a National Interest article last February, Migranyan said American conservatives should “recognize Putin is the same type of ‘great communicator’ that Reagan represented—a bold leader and visionary.”

“I would like to turn to O’Reilly, Krauthammer, Senator McCain, Dennis Miller, and others,” wrote Migranyan. “I would like to appeal to them paraphrasing Safire: ‘Gentlemen, do not be afraid to say that you love Putin, that you dream of such a leader for the United States.’

I’m tempted to say that I simply do not believe Kushner when he says that having Dimiri Simes host the Mayflower Hotel event was his idea. He may have taken over the project and seen that it went smoothly, but the choice to go with a den of Kremlin-controlled hosts could only have originated with someone with prior experience working with Putin’s D.C. operatives.

It is of course of interest what Trump said in the speech and that Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak was in the front row. It is important to know that Kislyak reported back to Moscow that he had met on the sidelines of this event with Jeff Sessions who claims to have no memory of their conversation. But more significant and damning than any of that was the decision to go to the Center for the National Interest and Dimitri Simes as sponsors and hosts.

Kushner needs to answer a lot of questions about how this came about, because it almost certainly was not his idea. And, if it actually was, that opens up a lot of new questions.

The House of Representatives is supposed to return to legislative business today at 2pm. The wheels on their bus aren’t exactly turning smoothly so it’s hard to be sure what their plan is since it keeps changing. They’ve abandoned the plan I called the dumbest ever back on July 14th, to pass this year’s appropriations bills in one giant package that their members would not have even been able to read. Instead, they appear to have scaled that back to what they’re calling a “minibus” bill (as opposed to a omnibus one) that will only include defense spending, an Energy and Water bill that involves our nuclear weapons, the money for veterans, and funding for the border wall.

The border wall money is interesting for a few reasons. One is that it probably can’t pass through the House as a standalone item. Another is that it really ought to be a part of the Homeland Security appropriation bill, but that isn’t one of the bills that they’re planning on including in their minibus.  And a third is that they have what looks like a bit of subterfuge planned to ram the funding through despite the bipartisan opposition to the wall.

This all become (somewhat) clear during an exchange on the House floor last week between House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer.

During their Thursday colloquy on the House floor, Minority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., asked Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., to explain the process under which the consolidated “minibus” appropriations bill would be considered.

McCarthy said that the minibus will be considered under a structured rule and that “we assume that there will be hundreds of amendments,” and that that is why he expects there will be late votes next week.

Hoyer asked McCarthy if he expects “we will bring the other eight [appropriations] bills to the floor in September.”

McCarthy replied: “I do intend to bring the rest of the appropriations bills through this floor and get them done to send them to the Senate.”

Hoyer noted that McCarthy mentioned earlier in the colloquy that the minibus would include funding for a border wall and that the Homeland Security bill is not in the appropriations package, and then asked him which bill the funding would be included in.

McCarthy said that the funding “will be an amendment made in Rules for the bill.”

Hoyer asked McCarthy to clarify as to whether the funding for the border wall would be an amendment automatically adopted as part of agreeing to the rule for the bill or if the amendment would be one made in order for floor consideration in the Committee of the Whole.

McCarthy said that he “can’t promise what the Rules Committee will do.” He continued: “The Rules Committee will find the right place to apply it, and we’ll be able to have the discussion on the floor.”

Hoyer said that he would hope McCarthy will make it known to the Rules Committee that “we ought to have that as a free-standing amendment, not incorporated in a rule that the vote for the rule or a vote against the rule is in of itself a vote on the wall itself.”

I don’t know if you understand that or not, but it looks like they’re going to try to sneak the wall funding into the rule under which the overall bill will be considered rather than having it actually included as an itemized appropriation. In a way, it makes no difference. But doing it this way helps members who oppose the funding make the argument that they never voted for it directly. It may also make it impossible to strike the funding out using an amendment, making the only way to kill the funding to defeat the entire minibus bill. Conversely, conservatives who don’t like the levels of spending in the four appropriation bills will be able to argue that they did vote for the wall funding. And this will be important to them because the funding will surely never pass in the Senate or become law.

Personally, while this is all opaque enough to defy understanding by all but the tiniest fraction of Americans, I don’t think legislating this way does anything but make people more cynical about politics. The so-called opponents of wall funding will actually vote to fund the wall. The budget hawks will vote for big spending with the excuse that they were trying to help Trump keep his wall promise. Everyone will understand, however, that the funding won’t actually materialize because Senate Democrats won’t allow it. So, the funding will be in the House bill (assuming it passes, which is not at all assured) but it won’t be in the final bill after it has been reconciled with the Senate version.

It’s a clever play that protects Republican lawmakers who want to avoid accountability, but the results are still unsatisfactory no matter how you look at it. Ultimately, the people will look at what actually happened (more spending) and what didn’t happen (a wall on the Mexican border) and conclude that the Republicans can’t keep their promises. When they try to find someone to blame, the Republicans will say “not me, it’s the other guy” and then say the Senate Democrats are responsible.

This is the way Congress has tanked their approval numbers over the last decade without a corresponding defeat for very many incumbents.

Jennifer Rubin asks if there is a scenario where Robert Mueller exonerates Donald Trump and suggests that it is almost unthinkable. Her rationale is that Trump wouldn’t be behaving the way he’s been behaving if he didn’t have something very bad to hide.

There are a few ways to look at this. The first is that Rubin is absolutely correct and that Trump is knowingly guilty of collusion with the Russians' hacking attempts and the strategy for making the best use of the hacked material. The conspiracy could even go deeper than this and involve knowledge of hacks on voter databases and shared electronic communications for the purpose of targeting voters. This would explain Trump’s behavior.

But there are other explanations possible that may lie in between total innocence and the type of evidence that would virtually compel a Republican congress to impeach and convict the president.

It may be true, for example, that Trump’s been heavily reliant on Russian investment in his real estate ventures. If this has involved money laundering on the Russian side, that’s not necessarily a criminal act on Trump’s end. He’s just selling condos and luxury apartments. In many cases, all he’s doing is selling his name to these projects. He may want to be friendly to Russia for financial reasons, but that doesn’t mean Mueller can point to high crimes. Maybe he can, but maybe he can’t.

Another possibility is that Trump’s campaign was compromised or penetrated by Russians or people in the Russians’ control. Why would Paul Manafort offer to work for Trump for free, for example? But this is different from Trump being compromised himself.

On the strict question of collusion, it won’t be easy to demonstrate that Trump knew or directed it even if it is proven beyond any doubt that it took place.

But even if Mueller never brings a slam-dunk case against Trump on collusion, he will bring charges against those who have already lied to FBI officers or committed other acts of obstruction. The case against Trump for obstruction looks promising to put it mildly. And the idea that Trump’s business and tax practices can survive close scrutiny seems like a stretch.

In the end, though, I can see a situation where Mueller does not conclude that Trump himself colluded with the Russians and exonerates him at least to the extent that he says that he can’t develop a case that he would bring to court.

If this happens, we’ll get the Scooter Libby defense that the underlying charges were not proven. In that case, the investigation was vindicated and justice done by bringing other related charges. In Trump’s case, things are complicated by the fact that he can’t be hauled into court. He may, however, discover that members of his family can be. Resignation could look like an attractive option if it could be part of deal that keeps his family out of prison.

So, Trump could be in some sense exonerated of the main charge against him. But I can’t see a scenario where this ends well for him. Flynn and Manafort are already in plea mode, and Jared Kushner is in big trouble, too. Donald Jr. obviously has his own problems, and I wonder if Ivanka could possibly be isolated from all of this or if she can survive the scrutiny of the Trump Organization’s business practices in places like Azerbaijan.

Mueller would also have to basically punt while in clear field goal range to avoid making an obstruction case against the president. He could decide to do this if he thought the underlying charge wasn’t proven and the best course is to end the constitutional crisis. But I don’t see that as very likely.

I think Trump has created a world of hurt for himself and his family no matter how this plays out, but there are many more possible outcomes to this than that the president is found innocent or guilty of collusion.

I'm taking a vacation in a couple of weeks. I'm headed for the wilderness. And this is the best idea I've come up with in a long time. I just can't take this shit much longer. It's going to kill me if I don't get away from it.

I was browsing through my Facebook this morning when I came across an interesting entry. It pertained to my congressman who represents me here in Pennsylvania’s 6th District. At least on paper, Rep. Ryan Costello is one of the most vulnerable Republican members of Congress, mainly because although the 6th is one of most ridiculously gerrymandered districts in the nation it has turned decisively against the GOP in the era of Trump.

Costello anticipated this. For example, he declined to attend the Republican National Convention in Cleveland as a delegate. He joined Pennsylvania Republican representatives Charlie Dent, Brian Fitzpatrick and Pat Meehan in voting against the House’s Obamacare repeal bill. He also spent the spring running and hiding from his constituents who wanted him to attend town hall meetings and discuss health care and other issues.

Most recently, however, he was in the news for a scarier reason. On June 14th, he narrowly missed a ride to the baseball practice where James Hodgkinson opened fire on Republicans who were preparing for the the annual Congressional Baseball Game for Charity. Thus, he narrowly avoided being in the same line of fire that nearly killed House Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and wounded Capitol Police officer Crystal Griner, Congressional aide Zack Barth and Tyson Foods lobbyist Matt Mika.

It must be scary to realize that you came so close to death, and I can hardly blame Rep. Ryan Costello for being spooked and concerned about his security in the future. The problem is that he’s using the shooting on June 14th as an excuse for why he ducked a February town hall meeting in Phoenixville.

The local paper here understandably found that to be a ludicrous explanation for his absence and said as much in a report on the front-page.

Which brings me to the Facebook post.

Now, what Costello actually wrote was that the folks who invited him to the Phoenixville High School auditorium “actually were creating a potential trap for me so people would be able to shoot at me.” Of course, at the time, he cited a scheduling conflict as the reason that he wound not attend.

Costello wrote that “the fake town hall was intended to embarrass me into attending even though they didn’t provide any security considerations.”

Writing “basic security measures are normal, they had none,” Costello added in a subsequent email on July 7, “no question the partisan fake town hall organizers put me in danger and obviously ‘death trap’ is what it could have been.”

So, on the one hand he’s claiming that this was a fake town hall set up by partisans who wanted to embarrass him. On the other hand, he’s suggesting that he would have attended anyway if not for the total lack of security provided for the event.

There are a couple of problems with Costello’s account, however. First, it was a real town hall event:

About 380 people showed up for Saturday’s meeting and were ready to discuss some of their issues and pass along their concerns to Costello, a Chester County Republican who represents Pennsylvania’s 6th Congressional District, which includes portions of Chester, Montgomery, Berks and Lebanon counties…

…Attendees lined the center aisles waiting to approach the microphone. So many people showed up to ask questions that the two-hour meeting was not enough time to get to everyone who had lined up. By 3 p.m., about 10 people were still in line to ask a question before it was cut short.

I live nearby, and if you can pack the auditorium at Phoenixville High School, you’ve done something beyond holding a small symbolic protest.

Secondly, Costello never inquired about the security arrangements. In fact, he refused to engage with the organizers at all.

Wayne resident Claire Witzleben, who responded on behalf of the group to a Digital First Media inquiry about Costello’s security concerns, said it is “ridiculous” to suggest her group wanted to put Costello in danger.

“If he had responded to our requests, we would have been happy to discuss security concerns with him,” said Witzleben. In April, organizers told the Phoenixville Area School Board they tried at least 35 times to contact Costello through letters, emails and his website.

Despite the fact that Costello was not at the Feb. 25 event, Witzleben said “we screened people at the town hall about whether they were constituents of the Sixth District and we had local police there.”

If Costello saw no political upside to attending an event where he knew the audience would be hostile, I can understand that. I think he should be able to face his constituents, as Sen. Bob Casey did today in Erie, but I’ll also concede that he’s the best judge of what is in his own political interests. Either way, he should own his own decision, not try to retroactively accuse the people who invited him of trying to get him shot.

So, he turned up at the gym this morning and saw the headline in the Daily Local News about how he was making these cowardly and baseless allegations. He then collapsed right by the front desk, ran out to his car, and came back in in a profuse sweat to apologize for his bizarre behavior.

I’d like to reiterate that I do have empathy for how scary and upsetting it was for Costello to have such a close brush with death.  I know he’s also understandably distraught about the injuries that his friends and colleagues suffered while trying to practice for a charity baseball game.  I won’t begrudge him for one second any concern he has about his security at future events.  I wouldn’t even criticize him if he wanted to take some time off or simply avoid public events of any kind for a while.  He shouldn’t do anything that he finds frightening or overly uncomfortable.

But that doesn’t give him the right to make false accusations against his own constituents.  I know he understands this which is why he fainted when he saw it printed up in the local paper.  Whenever he feels up to it, he should apologize for his behavior, because it has been shameless.

I guess right about now would be a good time to revisit something Leighton Woodhouse wrote back in December, less than a month after Trump’s shocking upset of Hillary Clinton. I say that now is a good time because Woodhouse wrote back then about the transformation of Anthony Scaramucci from staunch Trump critic to big Trump booster, and Scaramucci has just been hired as the new White House commmuncations director.

Anthony Scaramucci — his friends call him “the Mooch” — is a blow-dried, gold ringed hedge fund trader straight out of Central Casting. Last summer, when Donald Trump dismissed finance people like him as parasitic swindlers who “move around papers,” Scaramucci snarled that Trump was “another hack politician” who would “probably make Elizabeth Warren his vice-presidential nominee,” considering his “anti-American” insults to the finance industry. “You’re an inherited money dude from Queens County,” the Mooch taunted Trump on the Fox Business Channel, doing his best impression of a guy asking another guy if he’d like to step outside for a minute.

Today, Scaramucci is a member of Trump’s presidential transition team.

Scaramucci’s journey from trash talker of presidential nominee Trump to economic advisor to President-elect Trump tracks Trump’s own abrupt transformation from firebrand populist outsider to Wall Street-friendly insider — an about-face that wasn’t just predictable but repeatedly predicted. As a man without an ideology, Trump is not a change agent but an opportunistic pragmatist. His goal is not to reshape the American economy or even the Republican Party, but to use the presidency to build his global brand and enrich himself and his family in the process. People like Scaramucci and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s choice for Treasury Secretary, a former Goldman Sachs mortgage banker who made his fortune and his legend exploiting the pain of the foreclosure crisis, may have been odd choices for the grenade-lobbing, drain-the-swamp-and-burn-the-whole-system-down presidential candidate version of Donald Trump. But they’re just the right kind of advisors for the self-dealing, oligarchical, President-elect version of Trump: the real Trump, the one who will be crowned Leader of the Free World next month.

Trump’s original plan for Scaramucci was to place him as the director of the office of public liaison, but Reince Priebus reportedly objected to this, citing Mr. Scaramucci’s sketchy overseas investments. I’m not sure why, but it appears that Steve Bannon is also a firm opponent of “the Mooch.”

“This was a murdering of Reince and Bannon. They said Anthony would get this job over their dead bodies,” said one top White House official…

…Scaramucci will replace Mike Dubke, who resigned from the job in May. He is stepping into the role as the White House is battling multiple Russia-related investigations, including whether Trump campaign officials colluded with the Kremlin, and as the White House tries to revive the collapsed Obamacare repeal effort…

One source with knowledge of the conversations between Trump and Scaramucci said the latter’s likely new post could be read as a message to Priebus, a former RNC chairman who has not built a strong relationship with Trump.

“Just hiring Anthony is telling Reince beat it, go find another job,” said the source, who cited the tense relationship between the two.

The first casualty here isn’t the White House chief of staff or his white nationalist chief advisor. The first casualty is Sean “Spicy” Spicer, the former press secretary and land-speed record holder for brazen prevarication.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer resigned Friday, following the appointment of wealthy financier Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director, according to a White House official.

Spicer’s abrupt and angry departure — which caught even senior West Wing staffers by surprise — reflects the latest upheaval in a White House that has been consumed by chaos and staff infighting since almost the day President Trump took office.

CNBC’s Washington Correspondent Eamon Javors reports that there’s a lot of internal dissent to this hiring from the press shop at the White House. These are folks who now work for Scaramucchi:

A source close to the WH press office just emailed me: "This is a joke. Trump wanted Scaramucchi on television as a surrogate."

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) July 21, 2017

Surprising to me someone close to White House is calling this a "joke" + "there was simply no understanding by the president" of this job.

— Eamon Javers (@EamonJavers) July 21, 2017

Most of the early reaction on this hiring is focused on the departure of Spicer, but it looks like it could signal a far greater exodus, starting with Priebus and those loyal to Spicer, and perhaps extending even to Bannon who has been reportedly trying to keep his job through the August recess by maintaining a lower profile.

This is all happening, too, as Trump and his family lose people in their legal team. A lot of his nominees have given up recently and taken their names out of consideration for top posts.

With Special Counsel Robert Mueller closing in and Trump looking like a deer in the headlights, the levee looks compromised and we should expect more people to seek higher ground.

And, with that, I’ll leave you with this classic tribute to Sean Spicer’s short career in the Trump administration:

We’ll always have these memories.

Some people have a problem with the fact that Donald Trump doesn’t staff up his own resorts exclusively with American citizens. Others are more bothered by the hypocrisy:

President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida has asked permission to hire 70 foreign workers this fall, attesting — in the middle of the White House’s “Made in America Week” — that it cannot find qualified Americans to serve as cooks, waiters and housekeepers.

Those requests were made to the Department of Labor in recent days and posted online Thursday. The for-profit club, where Trump spent numerous weekends this spring, asked permission to hire 15 housekeepers, 20 cooks and 35 waiters.

In addition, Trump’s golf club in nearby Jupiter, Fla. asked permission to hire six foreign workers as cooks. The applications to the Department of Labor are a first step in the process of applying for H-2B visas, which would allow the clubs to bring in foreigners for temporary work between October and next May.

Should Trump try harder to find American cooks, housekeepers and waiters? Couldn’t he post on Twitter that he’s seeking qualified applicants and fill these positions easily? I think that would probably work, don’t you?

In fact, it looks like he has to make some kind of effort.

Now, the Labor Department — which reports to Trump — must make decisions that will affect two for-profit business that the president still owns.

The next step, a Department of Labor spokesman said, is that the two clubs must take steps to try to recruit American workers for these jobs. That often involves placing help-wanted ads in local newspapers and contacting former workers. If those efforts are unsuccessful, then Trump’s clubs can ask for the Department of Labor to certify that it has tried and failed to hire Americans. After that, the Trump clubs can ask the Department of Homeland Security to issue visas for workers it has found in other countries.

Maybe we could start small and instead of building a wall thousands of miles long on the Mexican border we can just put up some barbwire fencing around Mar-a-Lago and his Jupiter joint.

I don’t have a problem with people hiring foreign workers but if Trump would tweet less about about Mika Brzezkinski and his desire to obstruct justice and more about these job openings, I’m fairly certain that hiring foreign workers wouldn’t be necessary in this case.

When the Democrats lost the White House in 1980, they also lost the Senate. For the first six years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, his party was in control of the upper chamber of Congress. In the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal, the Democrats won back control of the Senate during the 1986 midterm elections. So, why was Bill Bradley, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, the chief architect of Reagan’s 1986 tax reform?

There’s an involved and complex answer to that, but the short version is that Reagan knew that he couldn’t get tax reform at all unless he had buy-in from a lot of Democrats. Even though Bradley wasn’t even the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee, he was an expert on tax policy and he’d been advocating for reforms for several years. So, Reagan and Bradley went to work, along with the chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski. They produced a mostly laudable bill and Reagan got a signature accomplishment during the worst year of his presidency when many thought he might be impeached.

If Donald Trump wants to do an infrastructure bill, he should follow Reagan’s example. At the very least, he should make the effort. His alternative is failure because the Republicans won’t move on infrastructure until they get tax reform, and they’re not going to get tax reform. Plus, whenever infrastructure does come up, it won’t be immune from a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, so Trump will need at least eight Democratic senators to sign off on the plan. To get that kind of buy-in, he’ll need more than to repair some hurt feelings. He’ll have to grant authorship to the Democrats.

And, frankly, between certain failure and letting the Democrats craft the bill, it should be as easy of a choice for Trump as it was for Reagan.

So, what could Trump do?

He could invite Senator Bill Nelson of Florida to the White House for discussions about what he and the Democrats would like to see in an infrastructure bill. Nelson serves as the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee which has jurisdiction over transportation. He could also invite Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey. Booker is the ranking member of the Commerce Subcommittee on Surface Transportation. I’m sure Booker would be interested in getting the new rail tunnels completed that connect New Jersey to Manhattan.

Nelson and Booker would have incentives not to help, of course, but it would be hard to turn down the opportunity to get important things done for the country and their states and constituents. They’d have to negotiate with the Republicans in the House, too, who would be put out by having their leadership on the issue taken away from them. But Trump could make the case that they can’t produce for him on their own and he needs a win.

It would be a win for Trump if it happened, but also a win for the rest of us assuming that the bill would be worthwhile and addressed some of our most pressing infrastructure needs.

I can’t see Trump’s advisers giving this kind of advice, or even letting him know it’s an option. But maybe Trump will read this on his own and realize that there’s a way to make sure his name is mentioned in the same breath as Reagan, and not in a bad way.

There’s not much that I want to see Trump accomplish and I’m not interested in giving him easy wins, but this one thing I could sign off on.

It took me several tries to complete the task of reading the president’s interview with the New York Times because the man is so stupid and so morally repellent that I found it necessary to take breaks to protect myself from the psychic pain of absorbing what he had to say. The man is a pathogen and our country has a compromised immune system.

I could pick almost anything to highlight from the interview to make my point, but I am going to go with the part that should have been the easiest for him. In the middle of the president erroneously explaining that the F.B.I. only began reporting to the Department of Justice during the Nixon administration “as a courtesy,” Ivanka showed up unannounced with her daughter Arabella who just turned six on July 17th. The president invited his granddaughter to show off her impressive knowledge of Chinese.

How could this go wrong?

ARABELLA KUSHNER: [enters room] Hi, Grandpa.

TRUMP: My granddaughter Arabella, who speaks — say hello to them in Chinese.

KUSHNER: Ni hao.

[laughter]

TRUMP: This is Ivanka. You know Ivanka.

IVANKA TRUMP: [from doorway] Hi, how are you? See you later, just wanted to come say hi.

TRUMP: She’s great. She speaks fluent Chinese. She’s amazing.

BAKER: That’s very impressive.

TRUMP: She spoke with President Xi [Jinping of China]. Honey? Can you say a few words in Chinese? Say, like, “I love you, Grandpa” —

KUSHNER: Wo ai ni, Grandpa.

BAKER: That’s great.

TRUMP: She’s unbelievable, huh?

[crosstalk]

TRUMP: Good, smart genes.

[laughter]

Trump manages to take a feel-good moment and turn it into an opportunity to assert the genetic superiority of his family. His granddaughter speaks Chinese which is cute and praiseworthy. That’s great, but family protective services should show up to shield her from the racist influence of her grandfather.

Literally everything about the interview is obnoxious and grating. Trump demonstrates an inability to understand historical facts that extends from what happened moments before in a meeting with Republican senators to the causes of Napoleon’s defeat during his invasion of Russia.  Every story he tells is not just wrong but hit-yourself-in-the-head-with-a-hammer wrong.

Let’s look at what he says about the man he nominated to be his Attorney General. He says that the regrets choosing Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III for the job because Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian collusion in our past election. That’s an admission that he expected Sessions to help him obstruct justice and that he’s angry that Sessions rendered himself useless in that regard.

But let’s remember what actually happened.

During his confirmation hearing (which happened after Trump nominated him), Sessions testified that he had not had any meetings with members of the Russian government. That turned out to be a lie, and a lie that probably amounted to perjury. When his lie was exposed (which happened after he was confirmed), Sessions came under pressure to recuse himself from the investigation. He had to do this because Department of Justice guidelines compelled him to separate himself since he was now a possible witness and subject of the investigation. If Sessions had refused to recuse himself in those circumstances he would have instantly lost all credibility in the department and probably been rebuked by the DOJ’s Inspector General, too. The fact that he most likely perjured himself during his hearing made this a political necessity, too.

So, Sessions did what he was compelled to do and his deputy Rod Rosenstein was put in charge of the Russia investigation. Let’s look at how Trump remembers this happening.

TRUMP: Look, Sessions gets the job. Right after he gets the job, he recuses himself.

BAKER: Was that a mistake?

TRUMP: Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else.

Do you see the problem? The president nominated Sessions and he was confirmed before he realized that he needed to recuse himself. How could Sessions have told the president he was going to recuse himself before any of that happened?

Now, if you’re a stickler, you might argue that Sessions knew he had met with Ambassador Kislyak on multiple occasions during the campaign and that, as a result, he was a possible person of interest to the FBI’s counterintelligence investigators. He should have told Trump as much, and also told him that if he were asked about it in his confirmation hearings he would have to be candid about his contacts. Trump then could have decided whether he wanted to nominate someone who should, ethically, recuse himself. Obviously, he wouldn’t have done so.

TRUMP: So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the president. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, “Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.” It’s extremely unfair, and that’s a mild word, to the president. So he recuses himself. I then end up with a second man, who’s a deputy.

But Trump isn’t angry that Sessions failed to tell him about the meetings with Kislyak (assuming he did fail to do so, which is not assured). He doesn’t even seem to understand what happened at the confirmation hearing.

TRUMP: So Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers.

HABERMAN: You mean at the hearing?

TRUMP: Yeah, he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t. He then becomes attorney general, and he then announces he’s going to recuse himself. Why wouldn’t he have told me that before?

Nowhere in here does Trump acknowledge that if Sessions had told the truth at his confirmation hearing he would have been quite justifiably informed that he would not be confirmed unless he agreed to recuse himself. There’s no way Sessions could oversee an investigation that is going to need to investigate him. If Trump said that Sessions should have told him he was compromised, we could all agree with that. Maybe he did tell Trump and Trump didn’t care. Maybe Trump didn’t need to be told at all because he already knew. Regardless, this isn’t the focus of the president’s complaint.

His complaint is that he hired Sessions to put an end to the investigation and Sessions screwed up his answers at the confirmation hearing and lost the ability to shield him. But it’s more confused than that, because Sessions could not have known in advance that he’d get caught in a lie at his hearing, so he could not have told Trump ahead of time that he’d recuse himself.

His retelling of history just gets worse from here as he goes on to describe how Rod Rosenstein got to the point where he felt compelled to appoint a special counsel to investigate. Trump suggests that Rosenstein isn’t impartial because he’s from the heavily Democratic city of Baltimore, but he doesn’t acknowledge that he was the one who compromised Rosenstein’s ability to oversee the investigation.

Trump asked Rosenstein to craft a memo critical of FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation, which Rosenstein did. Then Trump blamed Rosenstein’s memo when he announced that he was firing Comey. Then he acknowledged that his decision to blatantly obstruct the investigation by firing Comey was made before Rosenstein crafted the memo and had nothing to do with the memo.

At that point, the circumstances of Comey’s firing became a criminal investigation and Rosenstein became a prime witness. He couldn’t head the investigation anymore, so he made the decision to appoint Bob Mueller to investigate.

Here’s how Trump tells his story:

TRUMP: Look, there are so many conflicts that everybody has. Then Rosenstein becomes extremely angry because of Comey’s Wednesday press conference, where he said that he would do the same thing he did a year ago with Hillary Clinton, and Rosenstein became extremely angry at that because, as a prosecutor, he knows that Comey did the wrong thing. Totally wrong thing. And he gives me a letter, O.K., he gives me a letter about Comey. And by the way, that was a tough letter, O.K. Now, perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter, O.K. But he gives me a very strong letter, and now he’s involved in the case. Well, that’s a conflict of interest.

Here is how Rod Rosenstein characterized what happened in his written statement for the record when he testified before the House and Senate:

On May 8, I learned that President Trump intended to remove Director Comey and sought my advice and input. Notwithstanding my personal affection for Director Comey, I thought it was appropriate to seek a new leader.

Rosenstein was told that Trump was going to fire Comey and was asked for input to help him justify it. He was pleased to do this, despite his affection for Comey. But when Trump suggested that his memo was the cause of Comey’s firing, Rosenstein got very irritated:

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was so upset with the White House for pinning the firing of FBI Director James Comey on him Wednesday that he was on the verge of resigning, an administration source told ABC News.

After Comey’s firing Tuesday night, White House officials said President Donald Trump acted on the recommendation of Rosenstein.

Basically, everything Trump said about Rosenstein is a lie or such a distortion that it amounts to a lie. Even when Trump says that “perhaps I would have fired Comey anyway, and it certainly didn’t hurt to have the letter,” that’s a lie. The letter was not written because Rosenstein was self-motivated to write it. It was not written in an effort to get Comey fired. It was not the cause of Comey being fired. Trump had already made the decision to fire Comey, which is what Rosenstein testified to under oath.

So, Trump totally mischaracterized this and created a conflict for Rosenstein which almost caused him to resign. This is what led to the appointment of Mueller, not the fact Rosenstein comes from Baltimore.

Everything in the interview is like this. It’s all funhouse mirrors and mostly false assertions that are as incriminating as they are intended to be exculpatory.  If the New York Times were to interview Trump tomorrow and ask all the same questions, all the details would be different but the overall impression would be the same. The president lies so much and has such a distorted idea of what’s happening around him that he literally doesn’t know or care what is true and what is not.

What shines through it all, though, is his unapologetic intention to obstruct justice. He didn’t want Sessions to bow out of his appointment because he was compromised. He didn’t want Sessions to testify truthfully. He wanted Sessions to kill the investigation and he recused himself instead. For that, he cannot be forgiven.

This is all more evidence that Trump is providing against himself in the obstruction case. And he seems blissfully unaware of it, which is maybe the most disturbing thing of all.

The man has the nuclear codes and is responsible for handling our foreign affairs, including North Korea’s efforts to put nuclear weapons on ICBM’s that can reach the American shore.

Since I just wrote a long piece on the disconnect between Republican perceptions of reality and actual reality, I am loath to write another one so soon. But, my word, can the Republicans get any more clueless?

Trump sees a border fortress as the physical manifestation of his identity as a builder and dealmaker — a president able to construct the nation’s security almost by hand, and to somehow persuade Mexico to pay for it.

The president has been questioning aides about the lack of progress: When will Congress approve the funding? Where are the schematics? Will it be made of concrete or steel? Which firm will build it?

[Department of Homeland Security Secretary John] Kelly said he is taking seriously the president’s interest in an environmentally friendly solar wall, which White House aides think could make the project more difficult for Democrats to oppose.

“Certainly, if someone thinks they can hang solar panels on there and reduce the carbon emissions and sell energy both to Mexico and the United States and it benefits everybody, sounds like a good idea to me,” Kelly said.

Trump is so fixated on a physical wall that in May, White House press secretary Sean Spicer showed off photos of tall steel rods along the border, calling it a “bollard wall.” Many scoffed that it looked more like a fence, and the president himself, one adviser said, had little patience for the design.

“He’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I didn’t say ‘bollard wall,’ ” recalled the adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid conversation. “I said, ‘The wall. Build a wall. People think wall, they think bricks and cinder blocks.’ ”

The president, the policymaker, the real estate magnate, understood one thing in his gut: He had promised a wall, and now he needed to build one.

It is not going to be hard for Democrats to oppose Trump’s wall, and it doesn’t matter if it is a “bollard” wall or a solar energy plant that can power the entire southwest. There will be no votes for Trump’s stupid wall. Perhaps nowhere does President Trump more clearly demonstrate that he’s insane than when he talks about this subject. He wants windows on the wall so people will be able to see the drug dealers on the other side before they hoist 60 lb. sacks of dope over the top and onto their necks. In case you are in doubt about the lunacy of this talk, a typical bowling ball is 15 lbs. Could you throw four bowling balls all at once fifty feet into the air?

He’s actually hassling the Secretary of Homeland Security for schematics? He doesn’t know that he’ll need a bunch of Democratic votes to get the funding for this and that no Democrat is willing to engage him on his fantasies?

Supposedly, they will scare Democrats into relenting on this.

Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) have been working with the White House to introduce a bill by the end of the summer that would cut the current annual level of 1 million green cards by half in 10 years, largely by limiting visas for extended families of legal U.S. residents.

Cotton, who along with Perdue has met twice on immigration with Trump, said the legislation is popular in key states where Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2018.

“Donald Trump recognizes that it’s possible to be both pro-immigrant and to believe that immigration levels are too high and skewed against educated, high-skilled, English-speaking immigrants,” Cotton said.

The strategic thinking among administration members is that they can gain a political advantage on immigration once they begin talking about proposals publicly. The release of the Cotton-Perdue legislation, they hope, will mark the beginning of a public immigration pitch.

Maybe they might bully some red-state Democratic senators into embracing a rollback of green cards. Maybe. But that has nothing to do with getting them to fund his dumb wall.

None of this even makes contact with reality.

And yet no one can convince Trump that he’s not on track.

I hate to do this but Trumpcare failed once before, in March, and I wrote its autopsy back then. In two long pieces (Trump Built His Own Prison and How a Tricky Tactic by Congressional Republicans Destroyed Trump’s Agenda), I explained why it was a major strategic error for the Trump administration to sign off on an unprecedented parliamentary gambit to avoid Democratic filibusters. I explained why it was doomed from the beginning and to the best of my ability what the fallout would be from the failure. I just went back and read them both, and I really wouldn’t add or amend anything. It’s playing out exactly as I described with the only difference being that the GOP couldn’t face the music back in March and so wasted April, May, June, and most of July trying to revive a corpse. I’d like to lay it all out for you again, but why reinvent the wheel when my pieces from March will serve the purpose?

Instead, I’ll just give a brief recap. The Republicans decided that they could take advantage of the fact that they never passed a budget last year to pass two budgets this year. This would allow them to use the first to repeal Obamacare (quickly, they hoped) and the second to pass tax reform. There were mind-numbing parliamentary reasons for creating two separate bills that you can read about in the “Tricky Tactic” piece, but the primary rationale was that it would allow the Republicans to bypass the Democrats’ filibuster and pass through both major pieces of legislation on strictly party line votes. They wouldn’t need hearings or expert witnesses or to have a traditional committee markup of the legislation. And, because of this, they wouldn’t get but also would not need any Democratic input, buy-in, or votes.

One obvious flaw in this plan is that it created an adversarial environment where the Democrats would not and could not work constructively with the Republicans, and in which the Republicans erroneously thought that they could get results without help. Even if the plan had worked for its intended purposes, there’s a lot more to politics than health care and tax reform, and the Trump administration would need a decent working relationship with at least some Democratic lawmakers (eight senators, for example, to clear a filibuster) to pass anything that wasn’t included in their two budget reconciliation bills. Their plan didn’t take this into account, so they salted the earth for any prospect of later bipartisan cooperation.

This wasn’t the only way that Trump salted the earth. He came out of the box with a toxic travel ban, for example, and he filled his cabinet with people who are more interested in dismantling their departments than running them. All of this contributed to an environment where Trump would be hamstrung by his inability to pass legislation through Congress. But the most damaging thing, in my opinion, was the adoption of this dual budget reconciliation plan because it gave the Republicans the idea that they were operating in a political environment that didn’t actually exist. It gave them permission to act with no thought for the future.

Of course, Trump did not understand what he was signing off on when the Republican leaders pitched him this convoluted plan filled with parliamentary jujitsu. But I was able to say in the third week of March, when Trump had just reached the sixty day mark of his presidency, that “he’s barely been in office for two months and he’s already cut off every possibility for success.”

I’d like to say that Trump was taken for a ride but he did have his thumb out and his drivers seem to have thought they’d built a functional vehicle. It was clear to me that they hadn’t, but this fact is just now occurring to the Republican leadership in Congress. They’ve discovered that they can’t pass health care reform even under a process that cuts the Democrats out completely, which also means that they can’t pass tax reform that way, either.

It’s also a blow to McConnell’s reputation as a master legislator and raises doubts in the White House about what Senate Republicans can actually deliver for President Donald Trump. McConnell, like Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), finds himself caught between the factions in his own party. And like Ryan, McConnell hasn’t demonstrated that he knows how to resolve the dispute.

“This is an impossible hand,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), McConnell’s closest ally, of the party’s fragile majority.

Why was it so easy for me to predict that they had dealt themselves an impossible hand?

For one, it was because I carefully observed the divisions within the Republican Party that led to the electoral defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and the forced retirement of Speaker John Boehner. They had tried without success to unify their caucus around compromise plans for governing with the Obama administration, and they had been forced to go to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for help so many times that they eventually invited a revolt from their own far-right voters and members. You can see that Speaker Paul Ryan is having the same problem today as he has failed to unite his caucus around his plan for passing this year’s appropriations bills.

House GOP leaders are resorting to Plan B on their spending strategy after falling woefully short of the support needed to pass a massive government funding package without Democratic votes.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced Tuesday night that the House will vote next week on a measure that includes just four of the 12 bills needed to fund the federal government. That decision comes after GOP leaders failed to get enough Republican support to pass the full dozen without the help of their minority-party counterparts.

The so-called “minibus” or “security-bus” will include measures that would fund the Pentagon and Department of Veterans Affairs, as well as the Legislative Branch, the Energy Department and water projects.

After launching a whipping operation Monday night to gauge interest in voting on the full spate of spending bills, GOP leaders walked away with a tally of dozens of Republican lawmakers who said they couldn’t commit — as well as several hard “no’s” — to voting for the partisan bundle of 12 bills, according to Republican lawmakers and aides.

The survey underscored GOP leadership’s ongoing difficulty in appeasing the party’s most fiscally conservative wing while still holding onto support from moderates, and serves as a reminder that ideological differences within the House Republican conference are likely to force the majority to continue making deals with Democrats to keep the government funded.

This is happening in the House where no tricky tactics are required to avoid Democratic filibusters and the GOP has a forty-six seat advantage instead of the narrow two-seat advantage they enjoy in the Senate. It’s unclear to me why the Republican leadership in Congress ever thought they could corral their own caucuses to vote in lockstep for their agenda, especially with a president as unorthodox as Donald Trump at the helm.

I’ve written for years that the Republican Party can’t fund the government or pay our debts on time if they need to rely on only their own votes, and nothing about that fact changed (or changed enough) just because a Republican president replaced a Democratic one.

What did change with the turnover in the Oval Office, though, was the Democrats’ incentives to provide assistance to the Republican leadership when their own members balk at governing. By deliberately choosing a strategy that cut the Democrats out, alienated and insulted them, and that never once contemplated a Day After when they’d need their help, the Trump administration and the congressional leadership paved their way into a dead end.

What they’re doing now is trying to come up with any way they can think of to avoid the day of reckoning when they’ll have to come to the Democrats and ask for their votes on anything. And, I’ll give them credit. They can be very creative in coming up with ways I could not anticipate to postpone or avoid this reckoning.

For complicated reasons I explained in my “Tricky Tactic” piece, the Republicans needed cost savings from Obamacare repeal to make their tax reform effort work, especially if they want it to be permanent and not sunset like Bush’s tax cuts. Now that they know that these cost savings won’t be there, they’re fumbling around for another solution. This piece is long enough already, so I won’t try to explain it here. Just know that it won’t work because they can’t agree to it internally. You can read about it here. It’s all an effort to avoid the consequences of their decisions, which I laid out in a June 29th piece: And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. That, too, needs no amendment.

This has all been predictable, it’s true, but it could not go on forever. They will have to raise the debt ceiling. They will have to pass appropriations or the government will need to be funded perpetually on Obama’s baseline numbers or the government will simply shut down. They need to reauthorize some major programs. Eventually, they’ll want to try to tackle Trump’s infrastructure plans. They can do none of these things without Democratic help because they can’t agree about them among themselves.

You can think of Obamacare repeal like a tractor-trailer that has jackknifed on the interstate. Everything else will pile up now, and none of it will pass through because there was no backup plan.

The president is not a very bright man.

President Trump on Tuesday called on the Senate to end the legislative filibuster after the collapse of the Republican healthcare plan.

“The Senate must go to a 51 vote majority instead of current 60 votes. Even parts of full Repeal need 60. 8 Dems control Senate. Crazy!” Trump tweeted.

This is stupid on a number of levels. First, Trump’s health care plan just failed at the 51 (or 50+1) vote threshold. By using budget reconciliation rules, the Republican leadership in the Senate had already bypassed the legislative filibuster that necessitates a 60-vote majority.

Second, it appears that Trump did not realize that a full repeal of Obamacare would require a 60-vote majority until after he demanded a vote. This is because the regulatory structure of the Affordable Care Act cannot be touched under budget reconciliation rules. This is vitally key information that the president should have understood when he was still a candidate crafting his campaign proposals.

Third, it appears that someone has finally explained all of this to Trump as a reason why the Republicans will not just go ahead and pass the same Obamacare repeal act that they passed in 2015. If they repeal the revenues from Obamacare but not the regulations, the entire insurance market will collapse. Trump just demanded that the Republican Party do this, and now he’s discovered why they will not.

Which gets him back to the legislative filibuster. If only it didn’t exist then the whole budget reconciliation gambit would not have been necessary in the first place. But he signed on to this strategy not only for Obamacare repeal but for tax reform.

And, yet, he’s never understood the obstacles or the math involved.

He’s so clueless and unself-aware that he doesn’t even have any shame about letting us all see how rampantly idiotic he is and how badly he’s been leading his party.

No one should be angrier about this than Republican lawmakers who must be shaking their collective heads in disbelief.