As of this morning, Hope Hicks is no longer working in the White House, depriving Donald Trump of whatever glue was holding his West Wing together. The 29-year-old former communications director had been like “a security blanket for the boss,” a person close to the president told my colleague Emily Jane Fox last month, shortly after Hicks announced her exit amid the Rob Porter scandal. “He trusts her and relies on her like none other.” The timing could not be worse: in the days leading up to her departure, Trump has fired multiple Cabinet-level officials, including two secretaries, while Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation plows through the president’s inner circle.

With all the drama, locking down a new communications director—a seemingly cursed job in this administration, held so far by five people—is more crucial than ever. (Senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who is holding the job in the interim, is not expected to permanently take the position.) But as befitting the Trump administration, the job search cannot help but be flecked with backstabbing. As New York’s Olivia Nuzzi reports, a clandestine power struggle has erupted in the White House between two front-runners: Mercedes Schlapp, the White House’s director of strategic communications, and Tony Sayegh, a Hicks favorite and Treasury spokesman. Though the two boast dueling qualifications—Schlapp holds the job Hicks had before she was promoted, while Sayegh was behind the rollout of the tax-reform P.R. push—the real war is apparently being fought in the media, where Sayegh was recently described as a “terrible bully” and an over-delegator by rival sources in the West Wing. Other officials and Washington types, meanwhile, have accused Schlapp of using her position to financially benefit Cove Strategies, the communications firm run by her and her husband, lobbyist and American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp, who runs CPAC. (A former senior White House official told Nuzzi that “access to power” had turned the Schlapps “into fucking monsters”; a representative from Cove Strategies dismissed the claims as “mistaken” and agenda-driven.)

Even before the dustup over Hicks’s job, the Schlapps made plenty of enemies in Washington, as I learned when reporting on CPAC last month. “I think she’s THE perfect example of people being given opportunities in this administration because others more qualified are shunning White House gigs,” a former employee of the annual conservative conference told me, reflecting on the lucrative nexus between CPAC, its corporate sponsors, and Matt Schlapp’s communications firm. (“[Mercedes] would be good” as communications director, a former A.C.U. board member conceded. “But, man, is that corrupt.”)

The more profound question, after the Sayegh-Schlapp grudge match is resolved, is whether anybody can meaningfully replicate the stability and control Hicks exercised over the president. (Hicks, who held the job for five months, was practically a career civil servant compared to her predecessor, Anthony Scaramucci.) Trump, of course, has always served as his own communications director, believing himself to be his own best spokesperson. “Bringing in someone else will not make it better,” a senior administration official told Politico. “Raj [Shah], Sarah [Huckabee Sanders], and Mercy all have their own functions and are doing it well.” Another person close to Trump was, if possible, less sanguine about the prospects of a Hope-less world: “She helps keep the White House from fracturing,” the source said. “I don’t think people realize what’s about to happen once she leaves.”