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Alexandra Petri: The good news about all these firings

The boot stepping on the human face forever is high-heeled! This is a great day for feminism, probably!

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson pauses while speaking at the State Department in Washington, Tuesday, March 13, 2018. President Donald Trump fired Tillerson and said he would nominate CIA Director Mike Pompeo to replace him, in a major staff reshuffle just as Trump dives into high-stakes talks with North Korea. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

The good news is that President Trump feels much more comfortable now. According to the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman, Trump finally feels like he has a handle on this presidency thing and is making the changes he wants to make. Good. So Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is gone.

Poor Tillerson. The former ExxonMobil executive had wished to be invisible and inaudible just to the media but had forgotten to specify that he should be visible and audible to Trump when he cast that ill-fated wish, and so he has been slowly transforming into a cricket for the past year and had to be carried around everywhere by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in a tiny lacquer box, stridulating sadly. The State Department (entirely populated by talking pieces of furniture left over from Henry Kissinger’s tenure that share his immortality but also his curse) is going to be headed by CIA Director Mike Pompeo, whom Trump says he gets along with well, because they share a frequency.

So that is good! If there is one thing we know about Trump, it is that his instincts about everything are correct. What a relief and comfort it is in this world of travail and change to have someone like that in our lives, fixed and bright as the pole star. Not in the sense that the pole star is an enormous ball of hot gas hurtling through space without direction or intent, but in the good sense. He will be firing a lot of other people who have been getting in the way of that inherent gut-rightness, which at first he had been doubting but now he will allow to glow forth like an immense garbage fire. And at least Pompeo’s voice may be audible to human ears, even if what it is saying is, “TEAR UP THE IRAN DEAL.”

Plus, Trump broke this news to Tillerson in a healthy way. Before the tweet announcing his firing, White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly did call him Friday to say that there might be a tweet that would concern him.

The further good news is that the House Intelligence Committee, or at least its Republican members, have concluded that we can just, like, move on and stop worrying about any kind of collusion or Russian meddling in the last election. Russia wanted to promote chaos in general, and just because Trump was a chaos candidate who would be a chaos president (Jeb! Bush’s words, not mine) does not mean that they favored him over Hillary Clinton, equally famous for her lax, haphazard approach to things.

Anyway, the committee talked to some people, and the people said they did not want to talk, and so the committee decided that this was enough and just left it, because – as they wisely reasoned – if there were anything to say on the subject, Stephen K. Bannon would say it, no matter the personal cost. The Russians did not want to influence the election in favor of Trump, and the only reason they kept meeting with Trump transition officials was sheer coincidence, like in a rom com. By the fourth or fifth time everyone would laugh and say, “Are you kidding me? You again?” but it was all a total mistake.

Also good news: The new head of the CIA will be a woman! And she has already broken that highest, hardest glass ceiling of presiding over a black site where detainees were waterboarded. We’ve gone from wat-him-board to wat-her-board! Ladies, we can have it all! Torture – more like tort-her! The boot stepping on the human face forever is high-heeled! This is a great day for feminism, probably! We have certainly not reached the point where you can consider women as people and celebrate or castigate them accordingly and therefore, ladies, we have to be thrilled about this development. Yay ladies!

In the course of the next week we can look forward to more firings and hirings like this. No more “no”! We are about to enter a whole world of “yes”! We are ripping off a bandage! We are tearing off the small piece of plastic that was preventing us from observing the large suppurating hole through which dirt can get into the bloodstream!

All good news! Nothing but good news!

Alexandra Petri | The Washington Post