First, this news yesterday:
With No Warning, House Republicans Vote to Gut Independent Ethics Office
Then, today, this:
House Republicans pull plan to gut independent ethics committee after Trump tweets

I'm not expecting a political discussion about the ethics committee itself, or about the GOP or Trump in general, what I'm interested in is: opinions of whether anyone thinks this might have been a coordinated ruse, attempting to engender public confidence in Trump? I'd like to restrict the discussion to just that question.

I mean, why would the house republicans do that, knowing what a backlash it would cause amongst all Americans on either side of the political fence? And then, while it's still at the top of the headlines and fresh in our minds, suddenly Trump looks askance at them and they all back down?

Honestly, I expected Trump to support them gutting the ethics committee, so both Trump's condemnation, and the GOP backdown, came as a surprise to me. That's why I'm not buying it. There's something odd going on here, it doesn't add up. Am I just being a conspiracy theorist, ascribing malign intent to random coincidences?

Very good questions. Maybe an answer will leak out, at some point, but the best theory I can offer you is that this was somebody's idea of a thing they thought they could get away with, hatched in private, without much in the way of coordination with anybody else.

"House Republicans pull plan to gut independent ethics committee after Trump tweets"

This headline bothers me because it mis-credits what influenced the change. Various members of Congress received a flood of phone calls including the office of Rep. Walter Jones.

Trump's concerns about all this was the prioritization of this action, not the actual actions the House GOP members were attempting. This clarification came by way of spokesperson Sean Spicer.

For anyone here in the US, please store the phone numbers of your representatives in your phone and call them regularly.

Oooh. Super good point. Lesson learned: Don't attribute intelligence to Trump by default.

House still guts ethical fish, just not the whole barrel. (yet...)

And again, the article still makes the mistake of saying that Trump made them back down. This is terrible, people will get the wrong impression from statements like that (like I did at first).