But what about the bad acts? There was little indication that Trump was appalled at Pruitt’s behavior itself, and that’s a telling, damning sign of what matters to this president and what doesn’t. Pruitt’s greed and grift: These were permissible, because these were familiar. Pruitt’s inability to quiet the noise around him was the real problem. Trump doesn’t judge people by what they do. He judges them by how they look.

And in the context of this administration, Pruitt didn’t look a quarter as bad as he would have in any other. Plutocrats to the left of him, scammers to the right: He kept company with a health and human services secretary (Tom Price) who racked up steep bills for unnecessary private planes; a commerce secretary (Wilbur Ross) accused of insider trading; a treasury secretary (Mnuchin) who went eclipse-viewing on the government’s time and dime; and a housing secretary (Ben Carson) with a taste for expensive office furniture. Price bit the dust, but the others, still around, are no doubt in mourning now. As long as Pruitt was in their midst, they weren’t at the bottom of the class and we in the news media had our hands full with him.

That’s one of the scary potential legacies of Pruitt, along with his excessively aggressive rollback of environmental protections and his complacency about climate change. He set an example of conduct so egregious that other wrongdoing looks amateurish and marginal. He simultaneously validated the cynicism that so many Americans have developed about why people go into government and how they exercise their power. If Pruitt, Price & Co. are what we come to expect, then we can expect a lot more of them.

Trump stuck with Pruitt until last week partly because he couldn’t afford any more turnover in his chaotic operation. He has been in office less than two years but is already on his third national security adviser. This administration burns through senior and junior people, and there’s hardly a deep pool of willing talent with which to replace them. More like an evaporating puddle.

That’s an important part of the Pruitt story and just the kind of thing that gets lost in the nuttiness of it all — in the $100,000-a-month charter aircraft membership that he apparently contemplated and the $1,560 of taxpayers’ money that he spent on fancy pens and his itch to ride around in a vehicle that, like the president’s, was specially armored. Pruitt was a mess all right, but he was also a mirror, reflecting a boss for whom governing is an act of epic self-aggrandizement.

He channeled Trump’s ludicrously grandiose articulation of his mission. He mimicked Trump’s convenient invocation of God. “My desire in service to you has always been to bless you,” he wrote in his resignation letter. “I believe you are serving as president today because of God’s providence. I believe that same providence brought me into your service.” I believe that I just burst a capillary rolling my eyes.