Imagine, for a moment, that your name is Gary Cohn. It’s December 2016 and you’ve been toiling away as the president of Goldman Sachs for 11 years. It’s a big job, and it’s made you incredibly wealthy, but you’ve got an itch. You want more. You want to be C.E.O. You’ve wanted to be C.E.O. for some time now, in fact, and, damn it, you think you’ve earned it. You’ve put in the time. You’ve smoothed out your rough edges. It’s been years since your last grundle-to-face chat with an employee. In short, you’ve proven yourself. But the guy occupying the coveted office, Lloyd Blankfein, is refusing to leave. Every time you start to think, ‘O.K., maybe he’ll do it,’ he announces impishly on Bloomberg or CNBC that he's not going anywhere—even, by your last count, after 10 fucking years running the company and a billion dollars in the bank. And even though people tell you it’s not true, a part of you has started to feel like he’s doing this just to to piss you off. Like it’s all a game to him—like he gets his jollies taunting you, watching you squirm. You’ve come to realize that he’s probably never going to retire, that he’s going to be buried in the backyard or something, as he likes to joke, just knowing how much it chaps your ass. And so, against all of your better judgment—against an entire career’s worth of prudent risk analysis, in fact—you decide to do something crazy.

You, a lifelong Democrat who has never once been deemed certifiably insane, take a job working for Donald Trump. In your head, there’s no way it can possibly go as badly as everyone says it will, and it’s not like Lloyd is retiring anytime soon, at least not for the next half decade. So you sign up for the gig and: it’s so much worse than you could have imagined. Every day at the White House is like sticking your most-prized appendage in a wood chipper, with one indignity after another. And so, after 13 months of horror, you finally quit. And you feel pretty good about it. And then, this happens:

Lloyd Blankfein is preparing to step down as Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s chief executive as soon as the end of the year, capping a more than 12-year run that has made him one of the longest-serving bosses on Wall Street.