Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham, once a top recruit to serve as White House press secretary, was early out of the gate on Friday with urgent advice for the president.

“Rod Rosenstein must be fired today,” she tweeted, after the New York Times reported that the deputy attorney general had floated the idea of wearing a wire in the Oval Office and removing the president from office by invoking the 25th Amendment.

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Ingraham, one of the 47 feeds that President Donald Trump follows on Twitter, tagged his handle in her tweet to make sure he didn’t miss her edict.

The “fire Rosenstein” sentiment — one she eventually deleted with no explanation — was publicly shared by Fox News colleagues and Trump pals like Judge Jeanine Pirro, as well as other close allies with the president’s ear, who did not walk back their comments.

But Trumpworld is no monolith — despite the perception that Fox News functions as an outside communications shop — and the divisions were on display Friday as differing opinions were blasted out in an effort to influence the president’s thinking after the bombshell story.

The varied reactions to the story illustrate the president’s dilemma: The West Wing and Trump’s top outside allies may be united in the belief that the president should fire his deputy attorney general, but they are deeply divided about the timing of the action and what the president’s stated cause for the firing should ultimately be.

Later Friday night, Fox News host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity spoke directly to the president on his evening broadcast, giving the opposing view from Ingraham.

“I have a message for the president tonight,” he said. “Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody.”

He added: “They’re hoping that they can turn this politically into their equivalent of a Friday Night Massacre,” a reference to President Richard Nixon’s demand in 1973 that his attorney general fire the special prosecutor leading the Watergate investigation. That act that led to a cascade of resignations at the Department of Justice.

A senior White House official also backed up Hannity’s more cautious tone by warning against any dramatic action. In an interview, the official called Rosenstein a “straight shooter” and said his denial of the facts outlined by the New York Times was believable.

Meanwhile, there was a growing sense inside the West Wing that the story was planted by leakers on former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe’s team, designed to bait Trump into firing Rosenstein ahead of the midterm elections and then suffer the political consequences. (A spokesman for McCabe has strongly denied leaking any of his memos to the press.)

While Trump allies are unanimous in their view that Rosenstein is highly compromised, they expressed concerns that Democrats could seize on Rosenstein’s dismissal to impeach the president.

The dissension among the president’s strongest supporters underscored again how they are far from one happy family. The talent at Fox News remain intensely competitive with each other. Meanwhile, their advice, delivered personally to Trump or on-air, is often greeted with eye rolls by White House officials working

in the West Wing, who dismiss much of what they say as nothing more than self-interested ploys to gain ratings or sell books.

Hannity, according to a source familiar with his thinking, does believe that Trump should fire Rosenstein — eventually. But like other Trump allies, he is pressuring the president that a better strategy than a reaction to a new story is to order him to release all materials related to the Hill investigation that prove there is a deep state opposition to him. Those allies said they expect that Rosenstein would refuse to do so, and that would be a better predicate for his firing than reacting to a news story in what Trump likes to call the “failing New York Times.”

It was also not immediately clear what motivated Hannity’s direct-to-camera plea on Friday night. One close Trump ally noted that Hannity sometimes uses his broadcast to speak directly to the president after the two men, who consult each other often, have had a disagreement on an issue.

Meanwhile, the “fire Rosenstein” faction of Trumpworld was equally adamant that the president should take action.

“It is clear the president has all the justifications he needs to find a replacement for Rod Rosenstein, and we’ve talked about this almost every of his presidency,” Matt Schlapp, the pro-Trump president of the Conservative Political Action Conference, said in an interview on Saturday. “I do not think there would be negative political consequences to making staff changes at DOJ, like the deputy.” Schlapp’s wife, Mercedes, works in the White House as a top communications adviser.

On Saturday, the White House had yet to issue any official response to the Rosenstein story, and Trump had yet to weigh in on Twitter as the world around him tried to sway his opinion on what to do.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s critics on Capitol Hill aren’t calling for his head — at least for now.

President Donald Trump’s top congressional allies have spent months building a case for Rosenstein’s ouster, even threatening to impeach him in July. But after an explosive New York Times report Friday that Rosenstein discussed invoking the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office — and proposed wearing a wire to spy on the president — Trump’s allies have been muted.

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House Freedom Caucus leaders Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan, who led a charge to impeach Rosenstein this summer, have said they want to hear from Rosenstein and see documents allegedly describing the comments before they decide what to do. That’s awarded Rosenstein a courtesy they’ve never given him in the past.

“I think Rod needs to come before Congress this week and explain under oath what exactly he said and didn’t say,” Meadows said at the Values Voters Summit Saturday.

The newfound hesitation to oust Rosenstein highlights a cautious approach Trump allies have adopted as the Republican party barrels toward a potential bloodbath in the midterms. Some Republicans fear Trump firing Rosenstein now would only further energize Democrats making the case to voters that the president is corrupt and needs to be reined in by a Democratic House.

House Republicans are also facing a time crunch. GOP leaders plan to cancel all October votes to allow members to campaign, leaving little time to go after Rosenstein.

In fact, Trump allies have just four days to come up with a plan — which could be why they appear likely to delay any action until after the election.

In a Friday interview, Jordan, one of Rosenstein’s fiercest critics in Congress, sidestepped questions about whether the House should revisit Rosenstein’s impeachment or try to hold him in contempt of Congress. Rather, he said, a more focused push to obtain sensitive documents from the Justice Department — which Trump’s allies say would expose anti-Trump bias and corruption the FBI — is the most urgent priority.

“I want to see those memos and evaluate them,” said Jordan, who has clashed publicly with Rosenstein over access to documents and accused him of threatening House Intelligence Committee staffers, an allegation Rosenstein denied.

Jordan wasn’t alone in his hesitation. Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), another vocal Trump ally who has regularly blasted Rosenstein’s stewardship of the Russia investigation, noted that “these [NYT] assertions, however, are based entirely on anonymous sources, which are far from a guarantee of veracity.”

“Furthermore, the reports differ in their assessment of Mr. Rosenstein’s intent in saying these words,” Gaetz continued. “Some sources claim he was speaking in jest; others say that he was serious.”

The skepticism reflected the views of some of Trump’s allies in the media, who spent much of Friday night warning that the apparent smoking gun to fire Rosenstein could actually be a trap meant to ensnare the president politically and legally. Fox News host Sean Hannity, whose show has regularly been a platform for guests demanding Rosenstein’s firing or resignation, suggested Trump should reject calls to fire Rosenstein because it could be the “deep-state” goading him into a controversy.

“I have a message for the president tonight,” Hannity said Friday night. “Under zero circumstances should the president fire anybody. … The president needs to know it is all a setup.”

Trump’s House allies have been investigating allegations of anti-Trump bias at the FBI for months — and taken their anger out on Rosenstein. They say the deputy attorney general has slow-walked complying with their demands for documents. That was their stated justification for threatening to impeach him over the summer.

Democrats and Rosenstein defenders have long argued that Jordan and Meadows are merely trying to provide Trump a pretext to fire Rosenstein because he oversees special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing Russia investigation. That probe has edged deep inside Trump’s inner circle, and Trump himself is believed to be the subject of an obstruction of justice probe.

By removing Rosenstein, Democrats argue, Trump could replace him with a loyalist who would exert more influence over Mueller’s work.

Now Republicans have an even more egregious accusation they can latch onto, but they’re not. The caution toward Rosenstein is a marked turnaround from previous dust-ups, when Trump’s allies in the House have given Rosenstein’s version of events little credence and have seized on anonymously sourced news reports to impugn Rosenstein’s character.

A Fox News report in July suggesting Rosenstein had threatened to access the phone records and emails of House Intelligence Committee staffers — which Rosenstein similarly denied — triggered a pointed confrontation between Jordan and Rosenstein at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in June.

This time, though, conservatives in the House are raising skepticism about the sources behind the Times story, noting that it was drawn in part from memos drafted by former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. McCabe was fired earlier this year and is facing possible prosecution for allegedly making false statements to internal investigators.

“Andy McCabe is under investigation for lying to the FBI,” Meadows wrote on Twitter Friday night. “His words and memos should be viewed with extreme skepticism.”

Jordan in the interview said he wants to see the FBI documents that allege Rosenstein discussed the 25th amendment and secretly taping the president.

Two senior leadership sources told POLITICO they didn’t expect Trump backers in the House to force the impeachment issue this week. They argued that Rosenstein has been turning over documents that Jordan and Meadows want.

The earlier effort to impeach Rosenstein appeared to have stalled. It had 15 cosponsors in the House before lawmakers left for the August recess, and no one has signed the document since then.

Not everyone appears to have gotten the memo, however. Conservative news personalities Jeanine Pirro, Matt Schlapp and Laura Ingraham all called on Trump to fire Rosenstein over the Times report.

Ingraham, however, later deleted a tweet that read, “Rod Rosenstein must be fired today.”

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein—who has been living on Donald Trump’s death row for more than a year—moved a whole cellblock closer to the gallows on Friday after the New York Times dropped this news-cycle cleansing scoop: The piece alleges that in May 2017 he discussed surreptitiously recording the president and raised using the 25th Amendment to remove him from office. At press time, Rosenstein had not been given his last meal or last rites, but the story and the follow-ups by other press hounds have given Trump every pretext he might need to terminate the man who oversees special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

Rosenstein was livid at Trump in the administration’s early and often chaotic days. As the authors of Friday’s exposé, Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt, previously wrote for their paper in June, Rosenstein felt the president used him to justify the firing of FBI director James B. Comey, and was vocally angry at the White House about the way it bruised his reputation. “According to one person with whom he spoke shortly after Mr. Comey’s firing, Mr. Rosenstein was ‘shaken,’ ‘unsteady’ and ‘overwhelmed,’” the Times reporters wrote back then.

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There’s little chance the new Times story was somehow “planted” by the White House to give Trump a ginned up reason to stage another Saturday Night Massacre. Goldman told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Friday night that the piece has taken “months to report.” Its findings have also been buttressed by the Washington Post, which in some ways expands on it. According to the Post, two FBI officials—then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and his senior counsel, Lisa Page—wrote contemporaneous memos in May 2017 reporting that “Rosenstein suggested candidates interviewing for the FBI job should wear a recording device to memorialize their discussions with the president.” McCabe’s memo also mentions Rosenstein’s invocation of the 25th Amendment to corral Trump (Page’s doesn’t). Most spectacularly, Rosenstein seems to have believed that he could enlist both his boss, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly in his 25^th Amendment caper.

There’s a Rashomon quality to the news reports of Rosenstein’s alleging scheming, with some giving more credence to the source provided by the Department of Justice who says in the Times story and elsewhere that Rosenstein’s “wire” comment was sarcastic—not meant to be taken seriously. Adding to the murk, the Post also reports, “One person familiar with McCabe’s account said Rosenstein brought up the idea of recording Trump on two separate occasions that day.” Because there was more than one meeting in the relevant period, the Post explains, perhaps the explanation for the conflicting accounts is that they could have had different attendees. But the Times’ version, citing “one participant” in one of the meetings, says that Rosenstein “replied animatedly” when asked if he were serious.

Never one to let a breaking news-hook go to waste, President Trump alluded to the Times story at his Friday evening rally in Springfield, Missouri. “Look what’s being exposed at the Department of Justice and the FBI,” Trump said. “You see what’s happening at the FBI—they’re all gone, they’re all gone. But there’s a lingering stench and we’re going to get rid of that too.” (Some of Trump’s most perfervid supporters, including Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro, wondered why Rosenstein hadn’t been dispatched before sundown—though, notably, Sean Hannity cautioned the president that it could be a trap set by his enemies.)

About an hour after Trump’s speech, Rosenstein added additional soft-focus to the murk with his second statement to the Times finding.

“I never pursued or authorized recording the president and any suggestion that I have ever advocated for the removal of the president is absolutely false,” Rosenstein said in what amounted to an appeal for clemency.

You don’t have to be the deputy attorney general to spot the elements of non-denial denial in the Rosenstein protestation. Saying you “never pursued or authorized recording the president” is not the same as saying you never proposed it. Likewise, bringing up the 25th Amendment in conversation with McCabe and musing that one could enlist Kelly and Sessions in the effort, as the Times says Rosenstein did, doesn’t necessarily rise to advocating the removal of the president.

Rosenstein’s semantic mousing around all but confirms the Times story. Even a good number of Trump’s enemies would concede that he shouldn’t have to harbor a coup plotter on his staff. “When you strike at a king, you must kill him,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson—or was it Omar from The Wire?—once put it. Rosenstein’s conduct has made him his own executioner.

The Times scoop and follow-up will launch a million speculative pieces about what comes next. Will Trump order a twin gallows and usher Sessions to his reward at the same time? Sacking the two of them won’t automatically end the Russia investigation, which eats at Trump’s backside like a million hungry chiggers. My colleague Josh Gerstein has gamed out the dance of musical chairs that will follow what now appears to be the inevitable sacking of Rosenstein, and I invite you to partake of his erudition or accept my shortforming of his work: Trump can’t reliably fire his way out the investigative dilemma he has trapped himself in. Mueller could fight his dismissal in court, Gerstein writes. Besides, the investigation is now too rooted in the files of other federal prosecutors (notably the Southern District of New York) and too alluring a topic for state attorneys general—over whom Trump has no power—to ignore should the special counsel go down. And if the Democrats take the House of Representatives in November, they’ll be able to use their independent investigative powers to pursue the president for at least the next two years.

So, yes, Rosenstein is a dead man. But Trump is a dead man walking.

******

Send foolproof schemes for my sacking to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts would rather resign than be fired. My Twitter feed would probably fight its dismissal in court. My RSS feed would ask, “How good is my severance?”

Endangered Republicans are running ads defending their achievements on health care — but it’s opioids they are boasting about, not the toxic fight about Obamacare and pre-existing conditions.

GOP incumbents in Kentucky, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania have run advertising recently focused on their efforts to bolster access to treatment, prevent overdoses and stamp out lethal synthetic painkillers like fentanyl. The conservative American Action Network has chipped in $5 million worth of digital and television ads in battleground districts, touting the GOP’s commitment to fighting the epidemic.

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GOP leaders on Capitol Hill are trying to get a final plan to President Donald Trump’s desk before the midterm elections. But even if the final work on the bills passed by both the House and the Senate spills into the post-election period, candidates can still showcase what they’ve done so far.

Democratic candidates also are touting their role in the bipartisan effort. But it’s especially critical for congressional Republicans who have struggled on health policy and pressed multiple largely unsuccessful attempts to gut the federal health care law. And now with congressional repeal efforts on hold, conservative state attorneys general are fighting in court to invalidate Obamacare, putting popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions at risk.

“Republicans coming home to their districts are safer to talk about [drug addiction] than anything else,” said Mollyann Brodie, executive director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The House in June dedicated a full week to approving more than 60 mostly narrow and non-controversial bills addressing aspects of the crisis, many sponsored by vulnerable Republicans eager to take credit for fighting drug addiction. The Senate approved its own sweeping package on Monday, and the two chambers are expected to reach a final deal before adjourning to campaign ahead of November.

The issue already is front and center in Pennsylvania’s 8th District, where GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick is touting a measure he sponsored that was signed earlier this year and cracks down on illegal drug trafficking. Fitzpatrick is facing a challenge from Democrat Scott Wallace in a state with some of the highest overdose death rates in the country.

“It’s been a top legislative priority for me in Congress since day one,” said Fitzpatrick, who is a vice-chair of the House Bipartisan Heroin Task Force. “The epidemic has hit all corners of our country and has hit us harder than most.”

Democrats are anxious to turn the tables on Republicans like Fitzpatrick after getting bludgeoned for four election cycles over Obamacare’s shortcomings. And polls show they have the upper hand: A POLITICO/Morning Consult poll earlier this month found that voters trust Democrats over Republicans when it comes to handling health care issues by a 15-point spread.

“The advantage on the issue has tilted to the Democrats,” said Michael Franz, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, noting that the health law’s popularity has risen. “It’s not such an easy foil to talk about the awfulness of Obamacare.”

Some vulnerable Democrats, like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who represent states hard hit by the epidemic are also campaigning on their work to address the crisis. The Senate Majority PAC, a fundraising committee aligned with Senate Democrats, is running an ad touting opioid legislation, sponsored by Manchin, to help doctors detect patients at risk of overdosing.

But the Democrats are far more intent on ripping Republicans for trying to dismantle Obamacare, especially the popular prohibition on discriminating against individuals with pre-existing conditions. They also point out that Medicaid cuts proposed by Republicans — which totaled more than $800 billion in a House-passed repeal bill — would have made it much more difficult for millions of Americans to access addiction treatment.

Rep. Tom MacArthur is among the Republicans touting his work on opioids in a New Jersey district that POLITICO rates a tossup. But Zack Carroll, the campaign manager for Democratic challenger Andy Kim, points out that MacArthur helped broker a compromise that resuscitated repeal efforts in the House last year after they initially faltered.

“He was the chief architect of the health care bill that would have imposed an age tax on older Americans, … gutted protections for preexisting conditions and raised premiums,” Carroll said. “What he’s trying to do is change the subject and talk about opioids.”

MacArthur argues that’s a distortion of what the legislation would have actually done.

Recent evidence suggests Republicans may be able to use the opioid response to their benefit. President Donald Trump made it a central theme of his 2016 campaign and swing state senators like Rob Portman of Ohio and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania capitalized on their work on the issue to win reelection by comfortable margins that year.

But Kaiser’s Brodie is skeptical whether the issue will resonate in a year when Obamacare is again looming large and Democrats are trying to build a blue wave.

“It’s a perfectly good talking point and it’s more of a bipartisan issue than most other issues, but I doubt it will move many voters,” she said.

Adam Cancryn contributed to this report.