I feel as if we are being conditioned to chaos by a “president” who abhors the stillness of stability. Every day we awake to a new outrage. We now exist in a rolling trauma — exhausting and unrelenting.

Yet even in that context, some things spike higher than others. Donald Trump’s firing of the F.B.I. director, James Comey, is one of those things. This should shock the whole of America out of its numbness.

This is outrageous and without precedent, unless of course we count (as many have) the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre in which “President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the so-called third-rate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down,” as The New York Times put it.

But Cox was just a special prosecutor; Comey was head of the F.B.I.

If you have been even mildly conscious over the past 36 hours, there is little new that I can tell you about this case, but here is the wrap-up:

In his termination letter to Comey, dated May 9, Trump writes that he concurs with “the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.”