Floating a dead balloon

On Ari Melber’s MSNBC show “The Beat”, former US attorney David Kelley was talking about Trump’s lawyers’ arguments to set a date for the insurrection trial in 2026. Kelley said that would be “floating a dead balloon”. Given the context, this is a mashup of “floating a trial balloon” (to propose something in order to get feedback on it) and “dead on arrival” (defunct in the very early stages). Of course, the mashup by itself makes sense as Kelley was describing something that was being proposed but was never going to be accepted. A big thanks to Mike Kovacs for hearing this one while at the same time planting a flower!