So we cut to the chase

Yeah, I know, I've been AWOL. But it's not like anything has happened in the news in the meantime. Just kidding.So where were we? Oh, that's right. Hope Hicks, who's been passed around like a tray of canapes at a smoke-filled gentlemen’s club. Hers is a story of sublimated incest and un-sublimated abuse. It makes me wonder what kind of home she came from, and I worry that she might slash her wrists.I am just SO fascinated by her—she might have stepped out of one of those dark, Freud-soaked ‘50s movies that were made by ex-Communists. The most ruthless and ambitious of the underlings in the West Wing sleep with her because she's the boss’s office daughter, pretending not to notice that the boss pats her butt and ogles her, just as he does his biological daughter, and fondly tells her what a sweet piece of ass she is. All of them, not excluding the boss, slap her around.We need to study THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS if we want to understand these people. Burt Lancaster in his prime would have done a better Trump than Alec Baldwin.I read on the CNN site this morning that Trump screamed at Hicks after her testimony—“how can you be so stupid as to say that you lie for me?”—and that she went home in tears. Axios says that she and Rob Porter are splitsville. This is Sidney to JJ's sister in SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS, but it could just as easily be Hope Hicks's next boyfriend, courting her over a midnight Martini at the Stork Club: "Look at yourself. You're 19 years old. Just a kid, and you're falling apart at the seams. You tiptoe around on those bird legs of yours, nervous and incompetent with a fatality for doing wrong, picking wrong... and giving up even before you start a fight! Wait a minute. It's the truth, and the truth hurts." Slap!I assume Kelly had a hand in all this. I wonder if he isn’t the source for those devastating Jared stories too, which would have been enough to bring down any other administration. Kelly is going to napalm the village to save it.Over on Facebook, I keep posting about how it's going to become increasingly obvious that Trump is non compos mentis. Judging from last weekend's Tweets and yesterday's gun control remarks, I think that day has come. And now Sessions is pushing back hard enough that I wonder if he isn’t helping Mueller. It’s all just too much—it beggars the minds of conspiracists, who prefer simpler stories that make sense.