(CNN) Five days ago, President Donald Trump announced that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was leaving his job, and would be replaced by Texas Republican Rep. John Ratcliffe .

On Friday, Trump announced that Ratcliffe had withdrawn his name from consideration because he was "being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media," and decided to step aside "rather than going through months of slander and libel."

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Uh huh.

To be clear: The media -- "LameStream" or otherwise -- had zero to do with Ratcliffe deciding to step away. Nothing. The reason he pulled out (or was forced to pull out) was because it was becoming increasingly clear that he might not have the votes to be confirmed in the Republican-controlled Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, usually a reliable backer of the President's picks, refused to immediately endorse Ratcliffe's nomination for DNI -- saying he needed to meet with the Texas congressman first. "I don't know John Ratcliffe," Republican North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN. "I don't know John," said Republican Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson. "I truly don't know him at all. I had never heard his name until last week," said Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins.

You get the idea. Ratcliffe's chances of confirmation growing thinner by the day. So he -- and the White House -- decided to cut bait.

So why didn't Trump know that there was so much doubt, even within the Senate Republican conference, about Ratcliffe? Because the President did what he always does: He pulled the trigger on the Ratcliffe nomination and then asked questions about whether the congressman had the necessary support of the Senate.

It's not hard to see how we got here. While Ratcliffe was in the mix to be DNI prior to last Wednesday's congressional hearing featuring Robert Mueller, it was the Texas congressman's aggressive questioning of the former special counsel. Ratcliffe took particular issue with the second volume of Mueller's report, which details seemingly obstructive behavior by the President. Here's the key bit:

"So Americans need to know this, as they listen to the Democrats and socialists on the other side of the aisle, as they do dramatic readings from this report: that Volume 2 of this report was not authorized under the law to be written. It was written to a legal standard that does not exist at the Justice Department. And it was written in violation of every DOJ principle about extra-prosecutorial commentary."

Trump was watching the hearing intently -- and came away impressed. As CNN reported when Ractliffe was nominated : "[The West Wing] didn't think he was aggressive enough, but his aggressive questioning of Mueller on Wednesday changed the thinking on that."

Within a few days, Ratcliffe was Trump's nominee. Because Trump liked the Ratcliffe performance with Mueller. In the we'll-figure-out-the-details-later world of Trump, he decided to leap -- and worry about looking some other time.

Which brings us to this week -- when it became clear that if Ratcliffe was going to get confirmed, it was going to take a herculean effort by both him and the White House. And on Friday one -- or both -- of those parties decided it wasn't worth it.

While Ratcliffe's life cycle as DNI nominee is among the shortest we've seen during the Trump administration, he's far from alone in being made a victim of Trump's approach to picking top aides.

You can blame the number of high-level misfires on a poor vetting process within the administration. And that may well be so. But the truth is that there is only one person whose opinion matters when it comes to these nominations. And Trump's impulse-driven choices are now a well-documented phenomenon.

Which means Ratcliffe won't be the last Trump nominee to last less than a week as a Trump nominee. Far from it.