It was a balmy Saturday evening at Mar-a-Lago, and for the second consecutive weekend in his month-long presidency, Donald Trump had retreated to his Palm Beach “Winter White House” to clear his head, take some meetings, and leave behind him the chaos of the swamp, and his rapidly cannibalistic West Wing. He was joined by Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, as well as various top aides.

By most accounts, Trump enjoys a rare form of quietude at Mar-a-Lago. “I watched him hold court—he was so comfortable in his own skin, and so relaxed,” Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian and V.F. contributing editor told The New York Times earlier this year. Mar-a-Lago, which doubled its initiation fee to $200,000 before Trump’s inauguration, has since morphed into a breeding ground for well-wishers, influence-peddlers, hangers-on, and others who can afford its extravagant dues. And Trump seems to love it. On Saturday evening, guests offered a standing ovation as he and Abe entered the terrace for dinner, The Washington Post reported, before taking their seats at a table in the center of the room. Wedding music from a ballroom emanated across the patio. Waiters served “Mr. Trump’s Wedge Salad.” Guests artfully ogled the two first couples making small talk after a day of golf and garden tours. It was just another Saturday night in our strange new world.

The mood tensed slightly, however, as guests became apprised of the Trump administration’s first foreign crisis. Not long after Trump and Abe’s theatrical entrance, North Korea test-fired a ballistic test missile into the Sea of Japan, sending shock waves across both the region and the international community. It was a chilling reminder of the grave threat presented by the opaque North Korean state. But it wasn’t enough to totally ruin dinner. Instead of immediately departing to a private room, the two world leaders remained in their seats, in plain view of other diners, as their aides brought over documents, which were reviewed with flashlights beamed from their cell phones. After a few minutes discussing the situation on the terrace, Trump and Abe eventually moved into private before holding a brief, hastily assembled press conference, during which Trump decided not to read from the prepared remarks written on a sheet of paper he held in his hands. Rather, he spit out a sentence and wrapped up the whole thing in about two minutes. “I just want everybody to understand and fully know that the United States of America stands behind Japan, its great ally, 100 percent,” he said, before the two popped into the wedding reception, at which the president grabbed the microphone to toast the “special, beautiful couple,” whom he reportedly said had “paid him a fortune” over the years. Before he left, he urged everyone to “get back to dancing.”

A source close to the president told me that Trump was going around tables during dinner asking guests if he should fire Priebus and Spicer.

The international crisis merely underscored one closer to home. Trump’s first 24 days in office have become a leak-filled mess, with the fortunes of various aides rising and falling in rapid frequency. Stephen Bannon, his chief strategist, and his precocious understudy, Stephen Miller, received much of the derision for Trump’s controversial executive order on immigration. (Last week, a federal appeals court ruled against the ban.) At the same time, the president has had issues with the performance, dress code, and even S.N.L. depiction of his press secretary, Sean Spicer. Kellyanne Conway, his counselor, has pirouetted from sticky situation to sticky situation—from referring to Spicer’s outright lie about inaugural crowd size as an “alternative fact” to possibly breaking federal law when she gave daughter Ivanka Trump’s clothing brand an advertisement on Fox News—seemingly unscathed in her boss’s eyes, but undoubtedly damaging her public credibility. Meanwhile, chief of staff Reince Priebus seemed poised to ascend after the successful rollout of Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch. Last week, my colleague Sarah Ellison referred to the rollout as “Reince’s Revenge.”

But a lot can happen within Trumpworld in a single week. While the president was hosting Abe in Mar-a-Lago, Priebus’s fortune already seemed to be on the decline. Christopher Ruddy, the Newsmax Media C.E.O. and Trump pal who spent an evening with the president at Mar-a-Lago, told CNN on Sunday that “there’s a lot of weakness coming out of the chief of staff.” (Ruddy would later issue a tweet backtracking.) A source close to the president, who was not there but had knowledge of the situation, told me that Trump was going around tables during dinner asking guests what he should do about Priebus and Spicer—a crowdsourcing game he reportedly played when he was deciding which candidate to choose for vice president, and again, when picking who he would nominate as secretary of state. (A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to request for comment.)