Last week, Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, held a press conference with reporters and it did not go well, from the perspective of people hoping to avoid the president being impeached. The train wreck involved Mulvaney admitting that there was a quid pro quo deal with Ukraine to investigate Trump’s conspiracy theories, claiming that such an abuse of power is “absolutely appropriate,” that the administration does this kind of stuff “all the time,” and that people should “get over it.” Later, when he realized just how badly he’d screwed up, Mulvaney tried to walk it all back, but that’s pretty difficult after you’ve basically come out and said, Yeah we did the crimes, what of it?

Not surprisingly then, it appears that Mulvaney’s job is not as secure as it was when he took the gig last December (on top of his duties running the Office of Management and Budget). Bloomberg reports that the president has been “privately testing the idea of replacing his chief of staff,” an experiment that began several weeks ago and seemingly kicked into high gear after Mulvaney’s disastrous performance. During a meeting a month ago, the president apparently told Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in front of a room full of people, “You have such great ideas, why don’t you be my chief?” Similar comments were made about Chris Liddell, a deputy chief of staff at the White House, and Trump has also asked advisers if trusted counselor Kellyanne Conway would be a good fit for the job.

White House aides, of course, insists this is much ado about nothing, and that the president frequently muses about firing senior officials and replacing them with colleagues “to flatter his aides and keep others on their toes,” as Bloomberg puts it, like the seasoned leader that he is. While it’s extremely unlikely that Mnuchin would move to the chief of staff job, given his relative success at Treasury, Trump’s close associates are said to have come up with a roster of potential replacements for Mulvaney that includes former acting attorney general and toilet-scammer Matthew Whitaker, veteran political operative Wayne Berman, and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, the latter of whom would be a highly unlikely choice, given his literary take on first son-in-law Jared Kushner. And while the White House claims that Trump openly talking about replacing Mulvaney is just one of his bits, it’s also how he’s opened the door to canning other members of his staff.