He canceled the hearing for the man he picked.

The boss canceled the interview for his own guy.

Here is a thing I have never once seen on a casino floor, and I have seen plenty. A man hires a dealer, walks him to the table, then calls the pit and says cancel it, send my guy home. That is what happened this week, except the table was the United States Senate and the guy was the President’s own pick to run national intelligence.

The President was in France for the G7, eating dinner at Versailles, and from there he reached back across the ocean to order the Senate to scrap the afternoon confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, the man he himself chose for the top spy job. His guy. His pick. His phone call to kill it.

Then he put the wiretap law on the table as a chip.

Now here is where Frank gets loud. The President said he will not sign the reauthorization of a critical surveillance law, the one that lets the government do its spying, unless the Senate first passes a sweeping voter ID bill. A bill, mind you, that has already failed, more than once. So the play is this: I will let the spying program stay expired, on purpose, until you pass the thing nobody will pass. That is not a deal. That is a man knocking over the chessboard and calling it strategy.

And he told the chairman to stay home.

The committee chairman, Tom Cotton, was ready to run his own hearing. Then, by his own account, the President ordered him not to show up. Think about that for a second. The chairman of the Intelligence Committee, told to skip the hearing he is the chairman of. I once knew a guy who got 86’d from a bar he owned. This is worse.

Nobody on his own side saw it coming.

The majority leader had a careful plan to fast track the pick and trade it for the votes he needed. The President blew it up from a dinner table in Europe, and the people on his own team found out the way the rest of us did, by reading about it. One senator on the committee called it an extraordinary display of dysfunction, a man determined to turn America’s national security into a political bargaining chip. Frank could not have said it meaner himself.