“There’s many reasons for that, the most obvious one being that it’s the presidency that in almost every single respect is out of the ordinary—beyond the norms,” said Cartillier, who has been reporting from Washington, D.C. for five years, three of which have been spent covering the White House. “There’s really a shift and there’s some sort of granular knowledge of what’s going on in this White House which was definitely different under the Obama administration.”

Since Trump took office seven months ago, many of his top administration officials (some of them now former) have become household names—and not just in American households. In France, people watched Kellyanne Conway defend inaccurate depictions of the president’s inauguration attendance as “alternative facts.” In Israel, people heard Spicer contrast Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of sarin gas to the Nazis’ use of “Holocaust centers” during World War II, in apparent reference to the concentration camps. In Brazil, people read about Scaramucci’s explosive interview attacking soon-to-be-ousted Priebus just days before he too was removed from his post.

This isn’t to say overseas fascination with American politics is a new phenomenon. “The Brits have been fascinated by Americans and American politics for a long time,” Rhys Blakely, the Washington bureau chief for The Times, told me, noting that the U.K.-based newspaper sent a correspondent to cover the first battle of the American Civil War. “Everything that we see today seems so unusual, but it's easy to forget how crazy some of these past administrations were.”

From President Obama’s historic ascent to the White House to President Nixon’s scandal-ridden exit and before, American politics in recent decades has been far from dull for most overseas observers. But the extent of that fascination—particularly when it comes to the internal dynamics of an American president’s administration—is new. “Before this administration, even people who were regular newspaper readers might not have known who the director of communications in the White House was, who the press secretary was—you'd have to be pretty keen to know that,” Blakely said. “But now these kind of characters—‘Spicey’ and ‘the Mooch’— are part of the conversation in a way that people occupying those jobs wouldn't have been previously.”

The White House has previously dismissed reporting about the internal power struggles within the administration as nothing more than “palace intrigue,” rooted less in reality than in the desire for idle gossip. And while some D.C. correspondents for foreign outlets I spoke with acknowledged that much of the heightened interest in White House politics appears to be in part for its entertainment value, others said it’s rooted in more serious concerns. “I will say from an Israeli point of view that because our country has such a strong connection to the U.S. and because in many ways our security and well-being is connected to the security and well-being of the U.S., many Israelis are paying close attention and they’re laughing about it,” Amir Tibon, the Washington correspondent for Israeli newspaper Haaretz, told me. “But on the other hand, some people are also looking at it with some concern because they're saying, ‘Great, isn’t America supposed to be the leader of the free world, the responsible and stable democracy, the country that everyone else looks to?’”