I knew we’d reach an “unskew the polls” stage of the campaign eventually, if not this soon. It’s a natural partisan reaction. I did … not think we’d reach a stage where the polls are so bad we need to play dumb about their existence. Watch the beginning of the first clip as Brianna Keilar tries to grapple with one of the longest, most awkward pauses in cable-news history. We’re losing, says Cohen? Says who? “Polls,” says Keilar. “All of them.” Pretty much all of them, yeah.

That’s the exchange that’s getting all the attention but the second clip, where Cohen slams CNN for touting the Trump campaign “shake-up,” is fun too. Would you ever hype a campaign revamp by Hillary Clinton, he asks, if it involved kicking her campaign manager upstairs into a ceremonial role and handing the reins to a guy who runs a bombthrowing populist site and has no campaign experience whatsoever? Uh … yeah, says Keilar, that would make the news at CNN. Is this really the best Team Trump can do by way of spinning the Bannon/Conway hires? Making the chairman of Breitbart.com the quarterback of the Republican presidential nominee’s operations in the home stretch of the campaign isn’t supposed to be treated as a “shake-up”? For cripes sake. Hannity could spin this better than that.

As further background on today’s definitely-not-a-shake-up, this piece from Benjy Sarlin has some choice quotes:

“[Trump] has been deeply unhappy for weeks,” a source who agreed to speak anonymously to discuss internal discussions told NBC…

“Over the last two weeks, concerned members of Trump’s inner circle plotted an intervention to try and convince Trump that he needed to mount a more traditional campaign with a more disciplined approach to attacking Hillary Clinton and appealing to swing voters.

Trump heard them out and then staged a campaign intervention of his own in the opposite direction after concluding, as the campaign source recalled him saying, “the guys in New York don’t know what they are doing.”

“This is him finally embracing the fact that he knows better than they do,” the source concluded…

“Hiring Bannon to run the campaign in the midst of its crisis is insane,” Republican consultant Rory Cooper said. “Trump needs a 75 day plan. He needs a political ground strategy. He needs an organization. Instead he’s bringing in someone who will encourage him to speak to the same ten people who have supported him from day one.”

Could be, but I think that’s overthinking it. Trump’s feeling on all of this was probably pretty straightforward: There’s no problem with Trump that can’t be solved by even more undiluted Trump. It’s like Nigel Tufnel concluding that the problem with his guitar solo is that it’s not loud enough. From now on, this Trump goes to 11.

Speaking of Hannity, Cohen is so “colorful” a character, with such a gift for inadvertent comedy, that he really deserves his own show at Fox. If Fox News can’t find a half-hour in its schedule for this guy to push Trump propaganda and butt heads with guests then Fox News has no purpose. He’s the natural next step in the O’Reilly/Hannity “outer-boroughs tough guy” shtick in Fox primetime. Sorry, Megyn!

Michael Cohen and @brikeilarcnn talk polls on CNN https://t.co/6OZtrfIwim https://t.co/QARiwckSY8

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 17, 2016

Trump counsel Michael Cohen says "there is no shake-up" in the campaign https://t.co/VCdwKEDIPG https://t.co/b4YxDEbDC3

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) August 17, 2016