4 October—Donald Trump is lording it over the most lawless, tyrannical, repressive government ever suffered by the United States of America from even before it was the United States of America. And Trump’s is also the most unstable regime this nation has ever experienced, doubtless a reflection of his notorious and undeniable narcissistic and sociopathic instability.

Trump and his flunkies have fired more nonpolitical civil servants as well as political appointees than any preceding administration—for blatantly trumped-up reasons that everybody knows are really political and vindictive. Trump doesn’t actually deny the malign motivation of his irrational and often spiteful executive orders, but his devoted flunkies embellish, obfuscate, and euphemize everything he and they say and do in the most altruistic terms.

Trump, like any dictator (and anybody else, truth be told), also rewards loyalty—largely the financial kind. That’s why virtually all top-level and many mid-level federal jobs in the most corrupt administration in American history are held by distinctly unqualified—and usually disqualified—donors and ass-kissers.

So Trump’s highly unqualified ass-kissing warlord Pete Hegseth announced yesterday that, one, he had fired yet more highly qualified senior Pentagon officials and, two, the military had conducted yet another illegal attack on a boat. Of course, that’s not quite how he put it.

The most senior victim of the sack is—was—Jon Harrison, chief of staff to the Secretary of the Navy. Don’t confuse him with the Chief of Naval Operations, by the way; Trump had canned Admiral Lisa Franchetti not long after he resumed his dictatorship because she’s not a he. But Jon Harrison was—as far as we knew—a Trump flunky who, since being hired in January, had been helping fellow flunky Hegseth re-screw-up the Pentagon’s screwed-up bureaucracy. (It’s not unusual for that sort of thing to happen in the corporate world, of course.)

And what flunky Hegseth described as a “lethal, kinetic strike” against a boat allegedly affiliated with a designated terrorist organization allegedly carrying narcotics is just another of the serial murders Trump has authorized and rationalized as “armed conflict with unlawful combatants.” And the scumbag-in-chief doubtless will get away with it because his majority of admirers on the shameless Supreme Court has made him all-powerful and unpunishable.

How long must we put up with an unstable nut in the White House?