When I say the stage was set for the legislative breakthrough of the year, I’m being quite literal: An actual Capitol Hill stage was put in place, complete with a presidential podium and bill-signing table, with the expectation that Donald Trump would sign a bipartisan housing bill into law on Wednesday afternoon.

The White House said the president would do exactly that — right up until he changed his mind shortly before the scheduled ceremony, directing congressional Republicans to instead focus on his anti-voting bill, which he calls the SAVE America Act.

For GOP officials, the president’s surprise announcement was a disaster. The legislation, several months in the making, was poised to be the single greatest accomplishment of the current Congress and the only bipartisan breakthrough of Trump’s entire political career. What’s more, Republican lawmakers had no idea this was even a possibility: Several GOP members were taking victory laps on Wednesday morning, blissfully unaware of the pothole the president was digging.

But as it turns out, they weren’t the only ones whom Trump blindsided.

Prominent members of the president’s own team were touting the housing bill and its looming signing ceremony on Wednesday morning, only to have Trump pull the rug out from under them, too.

This happens so often, it’s amazing people still want to work for the president.

When Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, some senior White House officials were blindsided. When he announced plans to deploy federal immigration agents to airports, administration officials were caught off guard and had no idea how to make the plan work. When Trump sicced the Justice Department on then-Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, White House officials had no idea this was coming.

Unfortunately, the list keeps going. When Trump pardoned a former Honduran president who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses,” the Republican’s own chief of staff was caught off guard. Even his notorious pardons for Jan. 6 rioters came as a surprise to officials throughout the White House.

To be sure, this is not an entirely new problem. Just seven months into Trump’s first term, for example, I took stock of the frequency with which the president had blindsided his own team on matters large and small. But he was still a political novice at the time, unfamiliar with how the federal government worked or how an effective West Wing operated.

Nearly nine years later, not only is the problem getting worse, but the Republican no longer has any excuses for leaving the people around him in the dark.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but those looking for evidence of a dysfunctional White House should start here. When a president’s aides are routinely shocked to learn of decisions from their boss, who wildly careens between contradictory paths without reason or explanation, the White House not only doesn’t work, it can’t work.

In a healthy and functional executive branch, ideas and important decisions are supposed to be scrutinized and carefully thought through ahead of a presidential announcement. This is less about norms and political courtesies and more about common sense: White House teams want to make sure the ideas will work and be implemented effectively before a president shares a decision.

In 2026, however, none of that applies to Team Trump, whose members are often as shocked as everyone else to learn what the president puts online.

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