WELL, THAT’S A TAKE: How Michael Avenatti’s flash-in-the-pan celebrity perfectly fit Trump’s Washington.

Chris Cillizza, fanning hard to make this take hot:

Avenatti is the sort of person who, in this climate, can’t and won’t be ignored, even as everyone (maybe including Avenatti himself) knew that none of this would end well. At all.

Avenatti came onto the national radar thanks to Donald Trump. He was hired by porn star Stormy Daniels to represent her in a suit in which she sought to end the confidentiality agreement she signed in the run-up to the 2016 election to keep her allegations that she had an affair with Trump in the mid-2000s quiet. Soon after he was brought on in spring 2017, Avenatti, who had always harbored a flair for and love of television, became a near-constant presence on cable news — making the case, loudly, that he had proof that Trump had coordinated payments to Daniels.

The way I remember it is that CNN gave Trump millions in free air time, hoping to make him the loser nominee. When that failed, CNN made Avenatti a permanent fixture on the network, hoping to bring Trump down.

Now that that’s failed, it’s spin-spin-spin.