The United States has had some turbulent and scandal-plagued Presidencies during its two-hundred-and-forty-one-year history—those of Richard Nixon, Warren Harding, and Ulysses S. Grant come to mind—yet there has never been one like Donald Trump’s. On Monday morning, I sat down to write a post about the swearing-in of John Kelly as the new White House chief of staff, and the beginning of Act II of Trump’s Presidency. By the time I had finished writing, not one but two news cycles had turned. In the afternoon, news broke that Anthony Scaramucci, the New York financier who was named Trump’s director of communications just a week and a half ago, had been fired. And on Monday night, the Washington Post revealed that President Trump had dictated a misleading statement that was given to the press about his son Donald Trump, Jr.,’s infamous meeting, last June, with a Russian lawyer.
