The Heads Are Piling Up

As chief executive of the world’s mightiest nuclear superpower, [Trump] has now spent most of his first term sowing panic around the world with an ever-tightening pattern of purges and forced resignations.

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The fallen include an FBI Director (James Comey), an NSC Senior Director for Western Hemisphere Affairs (Craig Deare, escorted off the White House grounds for criticizing Trump in off-the-record comments at the Woodrow Wilson Center), the first female White House usher (Angella Reid), a top Middle East adviser (Derek Harvey, a longtime intelligence official quietly whacked last week in what was seen as a message to Steve Bannon), an Acting Attorney General (Sally Yates), and a host of others.

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The most public posts are the most perilous. The next White House Director of Communications will already be Trump's fourth – you may have forgotten about Mike Dubke, who served for 85 days from February through the end of May. That doesn't even factor in assistant press secretaries like Michael Short, who ate the cyanide pill in the form of a hastily written resignation text last week.

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Basically, there is no successful formula for bureaucratic survival in this administration.

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The twin killings of Scaramucci and Priebus tell the whole story. The two men represented opposite strategies for surviving Castle Trumpsylvania, and both turned out to be equally ineffective.

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The kiss of death [for Anthony Scaramucci] was probably a Breitbart article about his brief but colorful reign. "Move over President Donald Trump. You are yesterday's news," the piece said. "It seems like this is now The Anthony Scaramucci Show. And Trump better get used to it."

If this was return fire from Scaramucci-accused autofellator Steve Bannon, who after all used to run Breitbart, it hit its mark. The bestubbled Pope of the alt-right understands the "never outshine Trump" dynamic better than anyone. Bannon himself was nearly ousted (and was in fact removed from the National Security Council) after Time magazine ran a somber cover portrait of Trump's Svengali in full pseudo-intellectual chin-scratch over the headline, "THE GREAT MANIPULATOR."

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This was actually was a mild take compared to the New York Times, which ran an editorial questioning, "President Bannon?"

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(GQ, in an admirably blatant attempt to get Bannon axed, has continued to call him the "shadow president").

  Matt Taibbi

Yeah, tRump doesn't read GQ.

The Scaramucci/Bannon rule seems to suggest that the best strategy for survival in the Trump White House is to lay low, keep your face off cable, and genuflect to His Highness as shamelessly and excessively as possible.

But that doesn't work either.

No dice!

Priebus, a born bootlicker and capitulator whose spine was surgically removed years ago during his first term as RNC chairman, tried exactly this strategy, and ended up just as dead as Scaramucci.

As my son said this weekend, Trump doesn't value loyalty as people are saying - he expects loyalty. He doesn't give it.

Priebus ultimately was reduced – this is according to the latest leaks – to listening at the door of the Oval Office in an attempt to guess who was meeting with the president.

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The Trump White House of late has become a must-see drama combining multiple reality genres, with the fire-the-loser format of The Apprentice merged with geeks-trapped-in-a-house concepts like Real World or the more apropos Estate of Panic.

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It's great television, but impossible politics. Trump, if he had any brains at all, would have kept Scaramucci at all costs. "Mooch" would have mesmerized the media with his ribald insanity and dragged the cameras away from Trump's impending indictment/impeachment, perhaps even giving Trump enough time to form a legal defense or an interstellar escape plan.

But even in a crisis, Trump cannot take not being the center of attention.

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Some see in all these maneuverings an effort to purge GOP loyalists like Spicer and Priebus. Others see a Nixonian lunge to hire thugs in a crisis. This to me is all overthinking things. There is no strategy. This White House is just a succession of spasmodic Trump failures, with a growing line of people taking the fall for each of them. You can fall with honor, or without, entertainingly or not. But if you join this White House, fall you will. It's only a matter of time.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.