WASHINGTON—This is going to be quite the week for the denizens of Camp Runamuck, so let's get it started off the right way by pointing out that the president* may be a dangerous paranoid know-nothing surrounded by half-baked advisers and a palace guard that most closely resembles a sack of hair, a bag of hammers, or a box of rocks. Take your pick. Anyway, this, from the Washington Post via The New Zealand Herald, is insane.

Most members of President Donald Trump's Cabinet do not yet have leadership teams in place or even nominees for top deputies. But they do have an influential coterie of senior aides installed by the White House who are charged - above all - with monitoring the secretaries' loyalty, according to eight officials in and outside the Administration. These advisers have offices in or just outside the secretary's suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request. These aides report not to the secretary, but to Rick Dearborn, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy, according to Administration officials. A top Dearborn aide, John Mashburn, leads a weekly conference call with the advisers, who are in constant contact with the White House.

That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. If this makes no sense to you, that's only because you probably didn't grow up in East Germany.

The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior Administration officials. At the Pentagon, they're privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who's supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis "the commissar," according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It's a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.

First of all, they think they need a political officer to keep an eye on Scott Freaking Pruitt, the man who'd sell fracking rights to Lincoln's forehead on Mount Rushmore if he thought his contributors could turn a buck. That's one small step short of talking to the flowers on the wallpaper. And how long Mattis is going to put up with this is anybody's guess.

The advisers' power may be heightened by the lack of complete leadership teams at many departments. The long delay in getting Trump's nominee for Agriculture Secretary, former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue confirmed means that Sam Clovis, who was a Trump campaign adviser, and transition team leader Brian Klippenstein continue to serve as the agency's top political appointees. "He and Brian Klippenstein are just a handful of appointees on the ground and they're doing a big part of the day-to-day work" said Dale Moore, the American Farm Bureau Federation's public policy executive director.

The Post reporters are being very fair here, groping desperately for some examples of this being at least a quasi-regular practice in earlier administrations but, once again, they are failing because this administration, and this president*, are both sui generis. In the hands of an unstable president and his unstable stable of spalpeens and sycophants, this system is just as bad as it appears to be.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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