November 07, 2018 11:15 AM UTC

Trump Throws Coffman Under The Bus, Because Of Course

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• by: Colorado Pols

Via Denver7’s Blair Miller, you knew this was going to happen:

President Trump mentions several members of Congress he says pulled away from him during the campaign who lost, including Rep. Mike Coffman, R-Colo. “Too bad, Mike,” Trump says. https://t.co/uOUJVnnXL1 #copolitics pic.twitter.com/pxe4FHHJnY

— Blair Miller (@blairmiller) November 7, 2018

President Donald Trump’s pathological inability to take responsibility for any consequence of his bull-in-a-china-shop presidency made this morning-after insult piled on injury 100% inevitable. Nobody should be a bit surprised, especially after Mike Coffman’s two years of high-visibility dissing of Trump over anecdotal and personal matters–while voting with Trump over 95% of the time–that the president had no interest in softening the blow of Coffman’s defeat yesterday, indeed using Coffman’s loss as a cautionary tale with his own supporters to stay close.

Back in reality, of course, locals are aware that CD-6 has consistently elected Democrats in other races, and Coffman survived for three elections in a ticket-splitting feat of triangulation that bedeviled Democrats who always knew the seat was winnable. What Trump did most to affect the CD-6 race was to cast Coffman’s two-faced playing off his own party’s soiled brand in undeniably harsh relief. Once that happened, the ticket-splits that kept Coffman office simply evaporated.

We suspect there will be some lingering debate among conservatives whether Coffman should have openly embraced the President, but in the case of swing CD-6, we’re pretty confident that would have only widened Coffman’s margin of defeat.