Pick your favorite irony:
1) Donald Trump turns out to be terrible at firing people.
2) The White House celebrates its "American Heroes Week" by banning transgender volunteers from serving in the military.
3) Thanks to the president's harangues, we are actually starting to feel sympathy for Jeff Sessions.
I can definitely understand if you want to pick No. 2, especially since Trump just finished observing "Made in America Week" with an application to hire 70 foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago.
But let's talk for a minute about the way our president gets rid of unwanted members of his administration. It's a monument to passive-aggressive ineptitude. With Sessions, Trump has been broadcasting his displeasure to the world for more than a week without making the obvious follow-through.
And this was the guy who made "You're fired!" his calling card. Clearly, he brought a lot of fiction to reality TV.
Trump's attempts to drive Sessions out of office without actually confronting him began last week with his famous New York Times interview and then escalated through news conferences and the social media.
On one occasion Trump said he was "disappointed" in Sessions. This was during a news conference with Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri in which the president took a few questions after praising Hariri for being "on the front lines in the fight against ISIS, al-Qaida and Hezbollah." Carping minds noted that Hariri actually has a power-sharing arrangement with Hezbollah, which controls most of the people in his Cabinet.
Trump appears completely unaware that he's beginning to look like the worst terminator in history. Introducing Tom Price, the secretary of health and human services, at an event this week, the president jovially said that Price had better get the health care bill passed through Congress, "otherwise, I'll say: 'Tom, you're fired.' I'll get somebody."
This was at that Boy Scout jamboree when Trump did such a great job of impersonating your Uncle Fred Who Gets Drunk at Family Dinners. How many of you think the Boy Scouts have been yearning for the day when the president would come to their big event, tell the teens that their federal government is a "sewer," recount a long and incoherent story about a real estate developer who went off to make whoopee on his yacht, and brag incessantly about having won the election? On the plus side, Trump did not misrepresent the Scout position on Hezbollah.
Trump has been complaining a lot about Sessions' lack of loyalty, which might have confused people who remembered that Sessions was the first senator to endorse his presidential campaign, back in February 2016. You'd think that standing up to fellow Republicans who regarded Trump as a dangerous lunatic should have merited a little bit of long-run gratitude.
Trump cleared all that up, however, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal where he explained that Sessions' endorsement was "not like a great loyal thing" but merely an insignificant politician trying to feed off his star power and crowd-drawing charisma. ("He was a senator from Alabama. He looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, 'What do I have to lose?' And he endorsed me.")
Now Trump wants Sessions gone so he can replace him with an attorney general who will fire special counsel Robert Mueller. Sessions can't do it because he recused himself from all things Russia-related.
Mueller's probe into the Trump camp's relationship with Russia terrifies the president, especially if it involves an investigation of Trump family finances. So obviously, we are rooting for Sessions to stay right where he is and, um, keep persecuting immigrants, ratchet up imprisonments for nonviolent crimes and maybe go back to his old dream of imposing the death penalty on marijuana dealers.
Well, I told you this was about irony.