November 15, 2016 12:56 PM UTC

Mike Coffman Gets His Trump Hat

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• by: Colorado Pols

TPM’s Lauren Fox reports from today’s post-election meeting of the House Republican conference:

It was the first full conference meeting in the wake of Trump’s stunning election win. Members had been back home, in their districts, trying carefully to balance their bombastic nominee with their own re-elections. In the end, it turned out Trump’s vision helped them.

Now, even Republicans who once kept their distance from their party’s nominee, wanted to be on the right side of their new President. But the cognitive dissonance between what House GOP leaders were saying about Trump before the election and what they’re saying now was not lost on some members.

Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), a Republican who ran ads against Trump on the trail, shuffled out of the meeting hat in hand.

“I am excited about the next two years and look forward to working with the president,” Coffman said, adding that he was excited to do tax reform and to repeal and replace Obamacare. [Pols emphasis]

“I’ll tell you what is so exciting is I no longer have to worry about executive orders or excesses in the rule making process,” Coffman said.

We took note yesterday of Rep. Mike Coffman’s awkward victory speech, in which he was repeatedly heckled by the audience over his public distancing from his own party’s nominee Donald Trump. After Coffman’s speech ended, his wife Attorney General Cynthia Coffman gave him a quick kiss and then turned to the microphone to shout “Go Trump!” to raucous applause. The scene very much underscored the rank deception of Coffman’s triangulation against the Republican presidential nominee–deception that was aided and abetted by lazy local media repeatedly on the campaign trail this year.

Anyway, now that Coffman has his Trump hat, we know some local talking heads who need to admit they got played like a fiddle.