THE TRUMP PRESIDENCY IS LEAR AS FARCE

We've all heard that President Trump doesn't drink alcohol or do drugs. His pharmaceutical of choice, apparently, is chaos -- or at least what you and I would consider chaos. To him, it's a highly stimulating permanent war for his affections. Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman reports:

[Trump's] standoff with his chief of staff, John Kelly, appears to be resolved for the time being, with Trump having decided to return to the seat-of-the-pants decision-making that he believes won him the presidency. That doesn’t mean he has fully given up the idea of firing Kelly, though. One outside adviser to the White House said Trump has recently mulled the concept of creating a new West Wing structure without a chief of staff, one that would instead have four co-equal principals reporting directly to him.

Now, it's possible that this is just a lot of bunk from Sherman's unnamed outside adviser, whom we can now identify as Steve Bannon. We know this because Bannon was talking up the same idea today at the Financial Times Future of News conference.

Bannon says he believes that, if Kelly leaves the White House, Trump should not have a chief of staff, but rather four or five “direct reports like at Trump Tower”

— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) March 22, 2018

Steve Bannon at #FTFutureNews: I think the President will eventually operate as his own chief of staff, with 5-6 direct reports pic.twitter.com/OdVbjZHWii

— Peter Andringa (@p_andringa) March 22, 2018

But it's plausible that Trump would want a presidency in which there's no notion whatsoever of acting on behalf of the American people. It's easy to imagine that daily life in the Trump White House will eventually consist of nothing but a 24/7 contest to determine who strokes Trump's ego most effectively.

I guess that would essentially be the office-politics version of that Trump weekend in Tahoe:

In a ... report for The New Yorker, Ronan Farrow details an alleged affair Donald Trump had with former Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal, saying, among other things, that McDougal and the future president had sex during a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe in July 2006.

This would be would be the same Lake Tahoe weekend that, according to other reports, Trump also allegedly began his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, is said to have tried to entice adult-film star Alana Evans into a threesome and allegedly tried to force his attentions on a third porn star, Jessica Drake.

Who loves me most?

In one terrible moment, King Lear demanded that his daughters compete for his affections. Trump, if Sherman and Bannon are correct, wants to do that with his staff on an ongoing basis for the next three -- or, God help us, seven -- years.