The news was breaking out of Camp Runamuck on Tuesday morning. Some guy you never heard of left a job that, given the available public evidence, was largely an honorary position anyway.

Pivot! Shakeup!

Meanwhile, the president* was back on the electric Twitter machine, tweeting out obvious straight lines and shaking his tiny fists at Angela Merkel. All those columns referring to Merkel as the new Leader of the Free World must have sent a bug the size of a Buick up the presidential hindquarters. On the upside, he went to Arlington National Cemetery on Monday and demonstrated that he doesn't necessarily slander Gold Star families anymore.

Pivot! Shakeup!

Meanwhile, back at the White House, the knives are clearly out for Jared Kushner. The Dauphin pretty plainly is up to his eyeballs in Russian intrigue, and there seem to be Sources Familiar With The Situation who are using that fact to shove the Dauphin out of the way. (Of course, Sources Close To The White House are pushing back, largely through The New York Times.) But this can come as no surprise to anyone who was paying attention to the story that popped last week about the White House's setting up a "war room" to push back against the apparently fathomless reservoir of stories concerning Russian entanglements with the Trump campaign and the Trump administration.

From The Washington Post, via Business Insider:

The proposed war room, Axios reported, will be filled with "experienced veterans from the campaign trail who recognize the gravity of the situation." In an apparent acknowledgment of the seriousness of the situation, Trump staffers have reportedly begun using the phrase, "Go to the mattresses," a line from "The Godfather," meaning to go to or prepare for war. The White House could turn to figures like former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and former deputy campaign manager David Bossie, for help in the "war room," the Post noted. Lewandowski was fired last year after a series of campaign trail blunders, and Bossie is known for his 20-year-long investigation into Bill and Hillary Clinton. White House chief strategist and former Breitbart leader Steve Bannon is reportedly spearheading the "war room" effort.

(Let us pause for a minute to recall that "go to the mattresses" was Santino Corleone's way of declaring war on the other families in response to the attempted assassination of his father. That did not work out very well for Santino.)

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This was a tell. The pushback is going to be long and hard and extraordinarily dirty. Lewandowski is a hired button man, and Bossie is a career ratfcker from whom not even critically ill and bereaved parents, to say nothing of innocent produce, are safe. If these guys are operating under the direction of Steve Bannon, then there is going to be blood on the floor as the investigations continue, and it doesn't matter how many anonymous aides or young in-laws the administration throws overboard. It has been determined that this will be a streetfight, and that every constitutional institution is as vulnerable to collateral damage as those cities in the Transformers movies are.

I'm not entirely sure that the Congress, say, is prepared for what comes next; the Republican majorities seem utterly terrified. (Here's Lindsey Graham, chickening out on the Kushner-Russia story.) When you've decided you don't care what you destroy, a war gets easier to declare.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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