While traveling aboard Air Force One from Colorado to Las Vegas, President Donald Trump attempted to kill two birds with one stone: nominate a loyalist to be director of national intelligence, and put a stop to the Republican-on-Republican violence in Georgia’s special Senate election. But he failed on both fronts. The president suggested Rep. Doug Collins—who is running against his state and the national party’s wishes—for the DNI job while chatting with reporters on the Thursday night flight. One might assume that a president would only float a nomination to the press after the potential nominee privately or publicly expressed some interest in the role, but not this president. Collins, who Trump may have been trying to repay for defending him throughout the impeachment debacle, spoiled the White House’s plans on Friday morning, declining the offer in a medium he knew the president would see.

“This is not a job that interests me,” Collins told Fox Business host and fellow Trump ally Maria Bartiromo. “It’s not one that I would accept because I’m running a Senate race down here in Georgia. Everybody knows I’m a supporter of the president, I know how much I have supported this president throughout this sham impeachment, everything else, but I’m running against a senator…who decided to support the president three weeks before she got the appointment.” Prior to dropping Collins’s name on Thursday to presumably gauge reactions from fellow Republicans, Trump, in a tweet announcing that U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell will step in as acting DNI, teased that he “will be nominating a terrific candidate for the job very soon. Stay tuned!”

Collins turning down the offer makes things awkward for Trump, whose DNI position has been in limbo since Dan Coats left the administration in August, and remains so in a precarious, post-impeachment White House. The tapping of Grenell to fill in as acting-DNI, which requires no Senate confirmation, fills the void left by the outgoing and less zealously loyal Joseph Maguire, who Trump became angry with after officials told House Intelligence Committee members about Russia’s efforts to help reelect Trump in 2020. According to the New York Times, the president reprimanded Maguire for not intervening to stop the House briefing. It now appears that Maguire’s ouster was just the beginning of a purge of so-called ”deep state” officials considered insufficiently loyal—an attempt, perhaps, to insulate himself from the internal dissent and leaks that characterized the early years of his administration.

Collins’s decision isn’t exactly great for Republican Party officials, either. “The shortsightedness in this decision is stunning,” National Republican Senatorial Committee executive director Kevin McLaughlin wrote in a January statement, of Collins’s announcement that he would enter the race, despite both the White House and the party throwing its weight behind incumbent Senator Kelly Loeffler. “Doug Collins’s selfishness will hurt…President Trump,” McLaughlin continued, “Not to mention the people of Georgia who stand to bear the burden of it for years to come. All he has done is put two Senate seats, multiple House seats, and Georgia’s 16 electoral votes in play.”

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