Republicans in Washington are currently in the midst of pushing a tax reform bill that, if enacted into law, would cause considerable tax savings to accrue to fabulously wealthy Americans, including, in all likelihood, President Donald J. Trump himself. As is the case with any ambitious legislative proposal, shepherding this abomination through the labyrinthine lawmaking process all the way to the president's desk promises to be a delicate task—so delicate, in fact, that certain high-level administration officials have apparently decided that the bill has its best shot at success if Donald Trump participates in the conversation as infrequently as possible.

During a Tuesday appearance on CNN, Democratic senator Tom Carper recounted a recent meeting in which he and several "more moderate Democrats" met with chief economic advisor Gary Cohn and other high-level White House officials in order to, as Carper put it, "see if there's some kind of middle ground on tax reform" that might facilitate across-the-aisle cooperation. Only one problem: After about a half-hour of earnest discussion, President Trump, who was out of the country on his Asia trip, suddenly called Cohn on his cell phone. "Fifteen minutes later," Carper says, "the president is still talking," so the senator offered a novel solution.

I said to Gary—it was a room where we're all sitting around this big table—and I said, "Gary, why don't you just do this, just take the phone from, you know, your cell phone back and say, 'Mr. President, you're brilliant, but we're losing contact, and I think we're going to lose you now, so goodbye.'"

Surely Cohn would never actually consider taking this advice and so brazenly lie to his boss, especially in a room full of peopl—

And that's what he did, and he hung up. And then we went back to having the kind of conversation that we needed to, where they asked the right kind of questions, looking for consensus and common ground. And I think we identified some of that.

Yes, apparently the President of the United States was so utterly unhelpful to his White House's attempts to court Democratic votes that his chief economic advisor felt the need to get him off the phone using the same tactics employed by high schoolers abruptly ending a prank call. (Carper doesn't say whether Cohn sold the story by making static noises into the receiver and/or mimicking a broken connection by uttering intermittent nonsense syllables, but I like to think that the answer to both questions is yes.) CNN's John Berman couldn't mask his bemusement at this story, which was only exacerbated by the fact that Carper didn't understand—or at least, in an A-grade bit of trolling, pretended not to understand—just how embarrassing this on-air revelation would be for Trump, Cohn, and pretty much everyone in their orbit.

BERMAN [giggling]: So you're saying Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to get the president off the phone?

CARPER [after a beat]: Say again?

BERMAN: Are you saying Gary Cohn faked a bad connection to get the president off the phone?!

CARPER: Well, I wouldn't—I don't want to throw him under the bus.

KIND OF LATE FOR THAT, SENATOR!

CARPER: But yes.

Should the White House continue to seek bipartisan support for its tax reform efforts, I suspect that Gary Cohn's calls to Tom Carper's office, for some strange reason, won't be going through.