Ten dimensional chess?

Althouse points out a revealing conversation she heard on the NYT Podcast this morning.

 Michael Barbaro asks how it happened that Congress is once again returning to the effort to repeal of Obamacare. "It just seemed so over" after the last defeat. Thomas Kaplan (who covers Congress for the NYT) answers: 

I looked like September was going to be a nightmare of a month because Congress needed to pass a spending measure to keep the government open, and they also needed to raise the debt limit, and that look like it was going to be this big, messy fight. To everyone's surprise...

The podcast shifts to audio of news reports of Trump's meeting with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and his breaking with the GOP and siding with Democrats to get a deal on these big messy things that were going to be the nightmare of September. 

Kaplan continues:

And that was a tough pill to swallow for Republicans, who were completely blindsided, but it sort of cleared the decks for the rest of September. Instead of having this big fiscal fight, that was resolved much earlier than everyone thought it would be.

For podcast listeners who may be only slowly waking up and blearily starting their day with the NYT podcast, Barbaro hammers* the point:

So, striking a deal with the Democrats on the budget, President Trump — and the Democrats Pelosi and Schumer — opened up another chance for Republicans to repeal Obamacare. That's striking.

Striking indeed.  Could The Donald have been that clever?  I dunno, he beat a huge, politically experienced field for the Republican nomination, then he beat the establishment Democratic candidate who had millions to spend, with little more than a patriotic, populist message.

He got a Constitutionalist on the Supreme Court to replace Scalia.

I'd say the chances he planned it this way are pretty good.