The story of a small-time ne’er-do-well becoming royalty has been a comedic staple for centuries, to be found at least as far back as The Arabian Nights, and it never stops being funny, as Groucho Marx found time and again. Maybe that explains why the sins of Donald Trump are unsettling in such an unusual way. Trump is the world’s most powerful person, but he’s also Rufus T. Firefly, the leader of Freedonia in Duck Soup. Groucho’s stock-in-trade is that he tramples on every bit of dignity associated with any office he’s given. When he’s a cigar-smoking college president in Horsefeathers, his first words to the outgoing president are “Never mind that. Hold this coat.” Then, upon being reminded that no smoking is allowed: “That’s what you said.”

Trump does this, and it has pleased many of his supporters—to some degree understandably. While Groucho always made a farce of his jobs, he also deflated every pompous mediocrity in his orbit. To see the self-satisfied and incompetent leading lights of Washington subjected to similar treatment by Trump was worth a lot to a significant segment of voters, even at a high cost. And Trump has delivered. He uses a National Prayer Breakfast to make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ratings on The Apprentice. He says Camp David is nice for “about 30 minutes” and avoids going there. And when he fires James Comey, head of the F.B.I., setting off political turmoil, his first tweet on the subject starts with the words “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer.” It hardly matters what follows.

So what we have is something that’s inescapably comical yet deadly serious. On the bright side, Trump’s clowning is so blatant that it prevents him from being half as subversive as the George W. Bush and Dick Cheney White House, which quietly politicized the civil service and breached norms far more sacred (like not torturing captives) than any touched by Trump. On the dark side, it’s early yet, and if a president can get away with firing anyone investigating White House malfeasance, then he can get away with a lot more—just about anything, really.

If the firehose of Comey coverage has inundated you, as it has everyone, then it helps to reiterate the heart of the matter: the head of the F.B.I. has been fired, and the reasons given by the White House—that Comey had improperly handled the investigation of Hillary Clinton—don’t make sense. That this F.B.I. was investigating people close to the president for possible ties to Russia, with a request made only days ago for additional funding for this effort, makes matters far worse.