Less than 24 hours after his Republican Party lost its House majority in convincing fashion—and shortly after he ducked questions about a potential Cabinet shake-up at a rare press conference—Donald Trump asked attorney general Jeff Sessions to resign. Sessions, the former Alabama senator and living Confederate monument elevated to his post thanks to the early and enthusiastic servility he displayed for Trump's White House bid, asked to stay on through the end of the week. Trump said no. It had to be Wednesday.

The new acting attorney general is Matt Whitaker, a Sessions aide at DOJ. In what is a fortuitous coincidence for a president under an active law enforcement inquiry, Whitaker has a lengthy history of opining, among other things, that "anyone" would have taken the infamous Trump Tower meeting on Clinton campaign "dirt"; that Trump was right to fire Jim Comey, the man who was investigating him; and that, in Whitaker's learned legal opinion, “There is no criminal obstruction of justice charge to be had here." Whitaker has already assumed Rod Rosenstein's supervisory duties over Robert Mueller.

In a summer 2017 panel appearance on CNN, he laid out a blueprint for how Trump could neuter Mueller without firing anyone; removing and replacing Jeff Sessions is the first step in his proposed process. (The New York Times reports it was anti-Mueller TV spots like these that earned Whitaker the president's attention.) Evidently, this shadow job interview went well.

Everyone knows that Trump despises Jeff Sessions, as indicated by the contents of the president's Twitter feed whenever he feels especially cranky. But the reason this bullying habit developed in the first place is because the president has never forgiven him for recusing himself from the Russia probe, thereby opening the door for Rosenstein to appoint the special counsel. If the attorney general were someone other than Jeff Sessions, though, Rosenstein's intervening presence would no longer be needed, and the new attorney general could retake control of the investigation, unencumbered by their own problematic involvement. If that person happened to be someone who is very, very loyal to Trump, they might even be able to make the whole thing disappear.

In his capacity as acting attorney general, Whitaker can fire Mueller for "good cause," which is a standard just nebulous enough that it could allow him to determine that some act or practice of the special counsel meets it. In August 2017, for example, Whitaker wrote in a CNN op-ed that Mueller's reported interest in the Trump family finances put him "dangerously close" to going beyond the "red line" bounds of his mandate. In a 2018 reboot of the Saturday Night Massacre, Jeff Sessions would be a very rough approximation of Elliot Richardson; Rosenstein would stand in for William Ruckelshaus; and Matt Whitaker would be the latter-day Robert Bork.

The likelier scenario, though, is that Whitaker is a sympathetic placeholder tasked with maintaining the status quo until the Senate confirms a full-time replacement, who will then lead the a full-bore assault on Mueller. Former Kansas secretary of state and disgraced voter fraud conspiracy theorist Kris Kobach has already been mentioned as a frontrunner; South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, who has spent the last year publicly thirsting after a Cabinet position, is doubtless hoping for consideration, too. Whoever volunteers to take the broadest oath of loyalty will be the one who gets the job. Whether they fire Mueller, or cut off his funding, or interfere with his work, or find some other way to undermine him, the effect will be the same: to protect the president from facing justice.